Futurological Congress

"AcademicSera" are the plural of "AcademicSerum" - a biological elixir designed to transform the recipient into a tenured professor. Perhaps the AcademicSera are extracted from older academics, in a needlessly painful process that involves boiling and pressure (one of the less-profitable activities of the Abrasax clan), but that would be speculation.

Each bottle of Academicserum requires the
harvesting of 100 Emeritus Professors

This is by way of introduction to the riveting topic of Mockademic Conference Tourism. Curb your excitement!

Congress predation

All the cool kids have been investigating and exposing the fraudulence of Congress Predators like WASET and BIT, and carrying on as if discovering a novel phenomenon. Or blogging about the torrent of scammy invitation spam inundating their in-trays. Heaven knows, there is much to blog about, for conference-predation is clearly lucrative and most parasite-publishers have diversified to latch onto the money-teat (even the most pathetic and sub-barrel-bottom ones). Or preparing checklists of "Tell-tale signs of parasitical publishers", and keynote-speaking on that theme at scamference offshoots of parasitical publishers.

What is forgotten in this trend is the happy complicity of many of the customers, for whom an overseas holiday thinly veiled as 'Conference Attendance' is an accepted part of their remuneration package, compensating for their risible salaries. The production-line conference mills serving their particular market are lower in profile, for they do not need to choke the interducts with their invitation spam (though they may spam anyway)... the customers are already committed, and all they want for $mas is a list of travel destinations to pick from.

The outcome has been the emergence of three niches in the vibrant ecosystem of junk-scholarship support. Niche #1 is occupied by the conference mills themselves, like Academicsera or the equally-egregious ResearchFora:



Behold the scope of their hard work and dedication to their cause: eleven International Conferences booked in Auckland (NZ) for January 5th alone, on a diversity of disparate topics (ranging from Sports Nutrition, ICSNS to Genetics of Wildlife, ICBPGW by way of Finance and Accounting, ICEFA); and this is only one city from one country. The mill must work around the clock, staff delving into Scrabble bags for newly randomised arrangements of letters to present as each meeting's theme and scholarly body.



The function room at the Surrey Motel could become a scene of interdisciplinary eclecticism, as they simultaneously strive

to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results about all aspects of $SCAM. It also provides the premier interdisciplinary forum for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns, practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted in the fields of $SCAM.

...Unless each specialty observes the fiction that the other 10 are somehow invisible. Assuming that any of the attendees bother to turn up to speak or to pin up a poster.

The same applies to the convention convergence the following day, when 10 meetings ranging in number from the 411th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture (ICLLC) to the 519th International Conference on Recent Advances in Medical and Health Sciences (ICRAMHS) fight for supremacy in the Functions Room of the Anglesea Motel in Hamilton, grabbing the microphone and the remote control for the PPT projector from one another in an unseemly brawl, all under the auspices of AcademicsWorld. Or the next day on the 7th: the turn of the James Cook Hotel in Wellington to host the 459th International Conference on Vehicular, Mobile and Wearable Technology (ICVMWT), the 527th International Conference on Medical and Health Sciences (ICMHS), and four other concurrent, equally garbage creations from the "International Society for Engineering Research and Development".

The Keynote Speakers for these Potemkin events are always "To be Announced Soon", while the Definite Program Schedules are equally unlikely to ever congeal; attendees already know that the events are frauds, so why waste effort making them look halfway credible? But the clientele do need some plausible pretense of documentation that they can show to their universities, so as part of the deal they buy a personalised Letter of Invitation. Also too, an entry in a Proceedings webpage.

Inside a Conference Mill

Which brings us to Niche #3. It also contains the DigitalXplore archive, but I would rather focus on the World Research Library, for the sake of its title of grandiose, Alexandrian aspirational scope. Just look at the different conference franchises whose Proceedings-shaped word-dumps are hosted there! It is ecumenical and non-partisan, accommodating AcademicSera and ResearchFora and the whole tangled thicket of acronymic competition.

The name and web-address used to belong to the Wood-Sutton counter-globalization World Research Library (described in SourceWatch), but the domain lapsed at some point between 2007 and 2015 and fell into the hands of entrepreneurs.

This leaves Niche #2, which we have already met in passing, for it houses the commercial conference-listing services, where an alluring panoply of tourism destinations parade before the discriminating consumer. Services like ConferenceAlerts, and another ConferenceAlerts, and AllConferenceAlert.

This proliferation of niches and websites may seem cluttered and bewildering, but do not fear: the entangled ecosystem of competition and symbiosis is simpler than at sight. It turns out that all the rival conference-mills, and all the listing services, and all the Proceedings repositories enjoy close propinquity in a suburb of Bhubaneswar (Odisha state):



This must facilitate the flow of freshly-generated Conference details from the mills to the listing agencies.

In a more dispositive detail, they are all subserved by a single IP address:

Which is to say, they are branches of just one business (or extruded pseudopods, if you prefer a more amoebic metaphor). The "IEEEconference" part of the operation is short for "Industrial Electronics and Electrical Engineers", and the possibility of a confusion with the prestigious meetings held by the "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers" is unintended and unfortunate.

However, we have only scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg. There are, in fact, other groups of conference-mill / repository / tourism symbioses. "AllConferenceAlert" lists hundreds of Scrabble-bag-named and equally-phony excuses to visit New Zealand (to pick a tourism destination at random) each month, churned out from a different network of production lines. In this case, "Academic Research Library" is the Potemkin Write-Only Archive for pretend-publishing the proceedings.

One could excuse all this, since the money-losing victim of this empire of scam is the Indian university funding system, but their use of Algerian in the logo is hard to forgive.

That dumpster fire repository is also used by ARDA International. And ASAR (the Association for Scientific and Academic Research), and "Academic World Research". These were spawned as part of an empire of congress generators and listing sites, centred on Technoarete Headquarters (which is to say Flat 4A, Girija Apartments in Chennai), largely registered by "Technoarete Research And Development Association". All are worth a visit for the quaintness of their English:

World academics since emergence of science has always been in need of excellent colloque where pioneers of science can exchange their knowledge and innovation. Cutting edge technology expands with rigorous interaction and sharing of knowledge and experience.

...but bored now, and leaving them as an exercise for the equally-bored reader. You get the general picture of the scale of spurious science. The yearly production of wholly bogus events from Indian assembly lines - all simply to facilitate and profit from the tourism needs of South Asian academia - must number well into six figures.

When assembly lines go wrong

Will no-one think of the carbon footprint?

[Thx John Chen for inspiration and lynx]