Predatory conferences are on the rise. Here are five ways to tackle them

Imagine being a medical researcher invited to present at an eye-health conference in London. You arrive to find that the other delegates are specialists in entirely separate disciplines, such as dentistry, pharmacology and midwifery. Your fellow attendees, who have travelled from around the world, are all expecting to attend conferences in their specific fields. But it’s not clear which conference is being held, why some sessions have been cancelled and why no conference organizers are present. An awareness slowly dawns: everyone has been duped.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. As Nature’s Careers team reports in a two-part investigation, researchers are paying commercial conference providers the equivalent of hundreds, even thousands, of US dollars to attend such ‘predatory conferences’. Institutions and funders don’t seem to be aware of the scale of these operations. They need to become so, and quickly.

What is it like to attend a predatory conference?

Academic conferences are one of the main routes for career development in research. The best events have carefully curated content that has been peer-reviewed by programme committees. Talks and panels are professionally chaired, and include enough time for discussion. There’s plenty of opportunity for all-important networking, and the quality of food is not an afterthought.

Predatory conferences, by contrast, exist to extract money from researchers, with little or nothing in the way of academic return. Often, they come about because there are insufficient spaces for presenters at well-established conferences, and because predatory conferences exploit the need for early-career researchers to attend international conferences. Unscrupulous companies are stepping into this gap.

Our reporter attended several such conferences in London between March and July. In some cases, both the academic content and the level of organization failed to meet the standards that paying delegates would expect. In other cases, conferences were better organized, but still featured presentations for which there had been little or no peer review. Often, those who are duped by such events are early-career researchers whose first language is not English.

How to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide

What then, can be done? Here are five potential interventions.

First is to heighten awareness among researchers, institutions and funding agencies. The InterAcademy Partnership, a global network of scientific academies based in Trieste, Italy, and Washington DC, is one of the few organizations attempting to track and combat predatory conferences. However, the full extent of the problem, and the level of financial losses incurred by attendees, is broadly unknown.

Second, supervisors and established researchers must advise their early-career colleagues about which conferences are genuinely useful. Predatory-event organizers target established researchers, too, as well as journal editors, with flattering offers to give keynote speeches, partly to entice early-career researchers to come. Those who receive speaking invitations need to be extra vigilant over predatory proposals. Senior researchers should flag suspicious conference invitations to junior group members and encourage them to ask about invitations they receive.

Third, research communities should more regularly publicize information on good conference practices, such as the necessity of thorough peer review, and provide links to trusted organizations.

Fourth, consumer-protection authorities need to become more aware of predatory conferences. Many countries have laws that protect consumer rights and have established public bodies to which people can report concerns if a physical good or a service they have been sold is not what it claims to be. Clearly, academic conferences are being sold misleadingly. And yet, according to Nature’s reporting, there is low awareness of predatory conferences among consumer-protection authorities. That needs to change, and it will need research leaders to do so.

Finally, the research community as a whole needs to come together and diminish the incentives for predatory conferences to exist in the first place. That means doing a better job of meeting the scholarly and networking requirements of early-career researchers so they don’t feel the need to attend any available conference.

Predatory conferences are not only unethical and a waste of time and money, but also risk public trust in research if they are allowed to proliferate. International cooperation and creative solutions are needed to put a stop to this dangerous development.