Sunday, July 12, 2009

Another Academic Scam

Every month or so I get a solicitation in the mail like the following one:

Dear Author

Hello?

As a general chair of GESTS, I am happy to invite you for the acceptance of yourpaper to be published in the GESTS International Transactions.


The GESTS is a nonprofit academic society organized by voluntary members aroundthe world since 2002. Every month, we publish the GESTS international transactionswhich are the regular paper journals on CSE and CSP, written by noble authors in more than 50 different countries.

This e-mail has been sent only to the authors who chose as a high quality paper that had been accepted as one of two parts of GESTS international transactions as follows:

-Part 1:

Paper Number : CSE775-727
Paper Journal: GESTS International Transactions on Computer Science and Engineering
Paper Field : Computer and Its Application

Volume Number: Vol.54 and No.3
ISSN Number : 1738-6438
Publication date: July 30, 2009.
Journal Type : hard copy with a green color cover
Online Journals: publication on the web in parallel to the printed journals.

-Part 2:
Paper Number : CSP775-112
Journal Title: GESTS International Transactions on Communication and Signal Processing
Paper Fields : Information Communication Engineering, Signal Processing, Image and Video Processing, Acoustics, etc.
Volume Number: Vol.13 and No.7
ISSN Number : 1738-9682
Issue Date : July 30, 2009.
Journal Type : hard copy with an orange color cover
On-line Issue: publication on the web in parallel to the printed journals.

Please, click the mouse on the "Major Conference Author's Paper Submission" at the home page, http://www.gests.org/. If the paper will be submitted through the web page, we will e-mail back with the details of how to proceed the submission of registration fees and copyright format.

Important dates for publication of the GESTS international transactions are :
- an improved paper and copyright format by July 27, 2009, ( http://www.gests.org/gests-full.rtf )
- the acceptance notification within ten days receiving your paper,
- the registration format with fees by July 30, 2009,
- the publication of GESTS International journal by July 30, 2009,
- and delivery start from GESTS to authors by August 10, 2009.

If you have a new paper or an improved version to be issued in GESTS international transactions, please, send us the final camera-ready version by July 27, 2009. At least one author of each paper must be accomplished with the registration.

We are looking forward to see your contributions at GESTS.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Bruce M. Bae, a general chair of GESTS,

http://www.gests.org/


I particularly like the "noble authors" part -- not to be confused with authors who have won the Nobel prize, of course.

The idea is, of course, that you submit your paper to this journal that nobody reads and then they charge you "registration fees". You'd have to be pretty dumb to fall for this one.

6 comments:

D. Swart said...

I generally prefer publications with a green color cover myself. But that's just me.

Anonymous said...

Given the existence of arxiv etc, I can still see a few purposes for real journals:

- Improve your paper by putting it through the refereeing process

- Certify that your results are (more likely to be) correct making it more likely for other authors to want to use and cite them

- Reach an audience that reads journals but not online eprints (do such people exist?)

- Impress your university's promotions committees
But I hope no promotion committee would be impressed by one of these fake journals, and the other reasons for journal publication apply even less well. So I'm left with the same question I have about spam: how does this sort of scam find enough marks to support itself?

fudo said...

I got tons of similar messages too, but apparently they gave up, at least with me. An entertaining fact: they usually misspelled their own name in the "sender" field as GSETS (instead of GESTS) Society.

Jeff said...

Oh yah? Well I'm being "considered for inclusion into the 2009-2010 Hertiage Who's Who Business Leaders and Professionals Honors Edition section of the registry". The invitation e-mail is complete with a misleading URL. The text "http://www.heritagewhoswhoform.net" is actually a link to

http://blazes.prioritymta9.net/c/c/14650/2751/661939/

I haven't clicked on it, so I'm not sure what it is.

Alex said...

Well these journals are pretty handy ... see, when you have a bunch of crazy ideas which make no sense at all ... and when everyone laughs at you and points out that there has never been a paper published supporting your ideas ... why, then you just shell out $800 or so, and voila! You're a real published scientist.

Of course, afterward people tend to keep laughing at you even more than before, but your new "paper" is a useful tool for convincing the ignorant that you know what you're talking abou.

Anonymous said...

Receiving periodic emails from GESTS and junk mail filter is not catching it somehow.

Here is the information on owners/operators of this conference, which could be faxe too:

kim sangbai
sangbai@sangbai.com
8/2, 168-5, Sangdo 2 dong
Dongjack, Seoul 156831
+82.01199896024

Seunghyun Cho
7th FL Pardise plaza BD 856-3 Janghang-dong Ilsan
Goyang, Gyunggi
+82.319076485
jungbo@jungbo.net

There should be a way to shut these people down.