Having blogged more than once about predatory conferences, I rate myself as the world's leading authority on this phenomenon of late-stage academia, so it is a disappointing mystery that no-one has tried to recruit me to deliver the Plenary Address at a predatory conference on the topic.
It is also disappointing that no-one asked me if it was a good idea to appoint Ruggero Santilli and Thomas Webster as Keynote Speakers at the 2nd International Conference and Exhibition on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, August 17-18 2020, in Miami (theme: Creating Intelligence structure and composition of the Nanotechnology). Both are old friends of Riddled and Forbetterscience. Of course I would have advised strongly against concentrating so much bullshit and bafflegab within a single venue, for fear of exceeding the critical density and triggering a collapse of the Informational Space-Time Metric into its ground-state of nescience.
The compressed digest of my expertise is this: any number of scammers started out as parasitical publishers, relieving desperate wannabee-researchers of their universities' funds in exchange for helping them meet their Research Output quota. Then they realised that more money could be made, more easily, by relieving researchers of their universities' funds in exchange for providing an excuse for an overseas vacation.
Thus aspiring publisher Dylan Fazel reinvented himself as "M. Osman, M.D." bombarding all and sundry with invitations to attend ESMED Global Conferences, while his portfolio of journal-shaped jizzmops was left to decay into desuetude and moribundance.
The OMICS empire of fraud includes not only PULSUS and Allied Academies and Longdom and umpteen other marques (hopefully less redolent of corruption and putrescine than the OMICS brand itself), but also 'ConferenceSeries' and EuroSciCon / LifeScienceEvents, MeetingsInternational, and so much more.
Not content with Crimson Publishing, Iris, Lupine and Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research. Sudheed Kaku (Colorado-resident failed code-monkey) registered 'conferenceseries.us' as a domain. His short-lived 'Biomedical Conferences' mimicked the look-and-feel of ConferenceSeries scamsites as closely as possible, in an attempt to freeload on the good reputation of OMICS.
Ashutosh Tiwari found several ways to profit from the vanity of nanotech and advanced-materials academia. His special innovation was to book function rooms aboard the Viking Line fleet of overnight ferries that connect countries around the Baltic Sea, and sell them as Baltic Cruise Conferences. Before that, though, he leveraged his post as Docent Lecturer at Linköping University (Sweden) into a vanity-publishing career, as "VBRI Press". The back-catalog of "Advanced Materials Letters" was free-to-read... then it vanished, and came back as pay-to-read (if you can't read the pay-to-publish contents, you can't criticise or laugh at them).
I'm not sure which of Balwant Rai's portfolio of grifts is currently active. His "JBR Conference Group" meetings aboard the Copenhagen / Oslo overnight ferry (from where could he have taken the idea?) sank without trace in 2019. His JBR-themed journals are moribund. A qualified belief in one's bullshit gives advantages for monetarising it, but for Balwant Rai - Space Dentist and broad-spectrum fabulist - his active fantasy life may have overpowered his commercial instincts.
If you don't have your own academic email account, with its spam tray overflowing with more examples, they can be found at D. H. Kaye's FlakyC blog. Then there's BIT Congress Ltd (a.k.a. BIT Life Sciences and BIT Group Global Ltd): an outlier in this list as it operates from China, selling tourism / travel / accommodation without a history of predatory publishing. It also operates as "Pioneer Century Science" and "Global Century Science Group".
After that introduction, meet OLC, Outlook Conferences International.
Our conferences instill a rewarding experience and will empower you to rub elbows with many of the industry leaders. The community of ambitious and accomplished professionals surely helps you spread your impact and optimize your research goals.
Just saying, "rub elbows" are not the words of a native English speaker
All this restless activity generates a Swiftian ecology of greater fleas and lesser fleas - the latter consisting of various Big Name scientists who are willing to monetarise their reputations and sell their prestige to any shabby little charade in need of credibility, and to deliver Plenary Address in return for flattery or payment. By now, Leonid's readers should not be shocked by the venality of Nobel Laureates nor by the low price of their virtue. Meanwhile Professor Herbert Gleitner (Academician of German Science) works both sides of the street, performing for Tiwari's Malacca-Strait cruises but also for BIT.
There is little more to learn about the Webster / Santilli Nanotech meeting in Miami, or how close the world came to runaway informational collapse, for snapshots of the website archived in the Wayback Machine end a month earlier. One of the diagnostic features of scamferences is a policy of amnesia, with websites disappearing as soon as the last cheques have cleared, in contrast to legitimate organisers who take pride in previous meetings in a series, and preserve a record of them.* We can only say that the first basic step for anyone setting up a real academic meeting is to secure a venue and default accommodation options for attendees, whereas the speculative Miami event lacked all of this.
But wait, there's more! Webster had already signed up as Judas Goat for another Miami nanotech meeting on the same weekend (without Santilli): the 9th Global Nanotechnology Congress and Expo, to be held at Crown Plaza Miami Airport and / or Sonesta Miami Airport Hotel, with the theme "Intensifying : Next level of Nanotechnology".
This one was first postponed to August from April on the pretext of the COVID pandemic, then cancelled (on the pretext of COVID) during that narrow window of time between "the trickle of registrations is drying up" and "the hotel needs a deposit to book the Function Room". Attendees (if any) were fobbed off with a 'webinar' a month earlier. Leaving the 2nd International Conference & Exhibition in undisputed command of the Nanotech scene in Miami that weekend, and sparing Webster the embarrassment of a double-booking.
As it happens, "Scientific Federation" (behind the 9th Global Congress and Expo) and "OLC" (behind the 2nd International Conference and Expedition) are the same scammers: Sunnapalli Reddy Sekhar and Vijay Tippani Kumar, of Hyderabad, directors of SciFed Private Ltd and of Outlook Conferences Private Ltd according to the Indian company registry. In these capacities they staked out domains and websites for more interchangeable scamference companies with the same staff (almost as if avoiding the name 'SciFed' as it becomes synonymous with mendacity): TheScientistt [Exploring Science : Promoting Innovation], and PrimeMeetings [capable of conceptualizing, planning and execution of events in technical field], and AlbedoMeetings [Let's Reflect Knowledge], and ContinuumForums. Who came up with these names, Oglaf's Vocabulary Bears?
Stolen from Oglaf
I claim some expertise on the activities of these wee scunners, after their incessant, heavy-handed spam goaded me into earlier bloggery. Call me a Con-man Hipster if you like (a phrase I did not expect to be writing today), but I knew them when they were still petty grifters with a dream, before they sold out and went commercial. They are the classic example of Hyderabad chancers, inspired by the flow of research funds into the OMICS trough to jump aboard the parasitical-publishing scamwagon themselves, before realising that the real money-stream lay in mockademic meetings. Readers with a university e-address will be familiar with the SciFed deluge of spam, each solicitation ending with the invitation "to revert" if you wanted to be taken off their list of targets targeted with even more. I can only say that they would not be so cavalier with that suggestion if they had seen me reverting on full-moon nights.
Their special innovation as scammy spammy journal-founders was to create the names of "editorial assistant" sockpuppets for their email solicitations by appending one plausibly-European forename after another (at a time when their competitors in the market preferred First-name+Initial-Letter combinations, in the belief that the victims of the spam were more likely to trust anonymous sockpuppets). This nominal profligacy might explain why the LinkedIn accounts for supposed SciFed publishing functionaries are identified by job titles but no names at all, our heroes having exhausted their stock.
All that is moot, now, and those nameless LinkedIn accounts have nothing to occupy their virtual time... Sekhar and Kumar stopping bothering to pay domain fees, so their journal website and all the archives vanished back into the quantum vacuum from whence it sprang.** I should be more sympathetic to the gullibillies who paid $$$ to have their opuscules and brain-droppings published hosted in perpetuity on the Interweb, but nothing of value was lost.
I should also show more sympathy to people who handed over $$$ to attend a SciFed / Prime / Outlook / Continuum / Albedo / Thescientistt congress that was cancelled at the last minute never designed to occur. Comments in a ResearchGate thread are consistent: 'Reimbursing fees for a cancelled event' is not part of the SciFed business model.
Sometimes, almost by accident, meetings do happen. Suffice to say that the hosting competence of this pair of wazzcocks matches their publishing capability. At an earlier stage of their career, they listed the details of their paid-up suckers in a spreadsheet (including email addresses for future spamming), and then left it lying around, unsecured, on their website.
We linger on the topic of Thomas Webster. Under the aegis of TheScientistt, he also signed up as Plenary Judas Goat for the Global Summit on Biomaterials and Applications 2020, in Valencia. "Due to the outbreak of COVD-19", GSBA-2020 was postponed for a year to allow more Abstracts and fees to trickle in, while morphing into Global Summit and Expo on Materials Science and Engineering, GSEMSE-2021 (the pandemic has been a great boon for the scamference industry). But perhaps Webster's name lost its cachet as a drawcard.*** Anyway, a small-print last-minute announcement informs us that the 2021 version was cancelled.
This one-year delay was not enough for accommodation options to materialise, nor a physical venue where this speculative event might convene. No sign of a provisional program, not even an Organising Committee tasked with pulling a program together. It is clear that our heroes never intended to make the meeting a thing. I am confident, though, that Webster was not a knowing party to the con.
So far the menace of COVID-19 has not forced the cancellation of not one, not four, but three TheScientistt congresses to be staged in Marseille over a single weekend in mid-November [h/t Pepijn van Erp]. Venues have yet to be named, but if the indeterminacy collapses into a single Function Room at the Marseille Ibis with three symposium streams speaking at three podia concurrently, this is part of the standard scamference practice and business model.
Keynote Speaker for the Vaccines Research & Development thread will be another old friend: Yehuda Shoenfeld, bringing the imprimatur of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities to legitimise this con, while rehashing his personal brand of anti-vaccine flim-flam. The presence of other promised speakers is less certain, for sometimes fly-by-night fraudsters have been known to lie about stuff. Professor Peter Hotez is listed, which came as a surprise to Hotez when Leonid emailed him.
Please excuse a brief digression about earlier Vaccines events, held with confusingly-similar titles under the SciFed rubric. Only fragments survive of the 3rd Global Conference And Expo On Vaccines Research & Development, March 25-26 2019, in Milan. Someone did preserve a record of the speakers. To show the quality of the curation, celebrated antivaxxer Antonietta Gatti was an Invited Speaker, reporting her latest discoveries of nanoparticles everywhere making vaccines deadly. Also, Giulio Tarro.
Tarro must have found the experience fulfilling (and they awarded him a Certificate!!), so he reappeared at the 4th Global Conference and Expo on Vaccines Research & Development, February 10-11 2020, in Lisbon (theme: "Enhancing the Quality of Vaccine and Initiation of New Medicine"). As well as the first Plenary Speaker, he features on the Organising Committee as Conference Chairperson. In that capacity, a link informs us that he was 2019's "most important virologist of the year and nominated for the Nobel award".
The website is even more of an optical crime scene than usual, with clashing garish colours, agitated movement, flashing police-emergency lights, and intrusive pop-up suggestions that you provide them with your email details for additional begging letters.
Giulio Tarro was once again a headline act at the 5th Global Conference And Expo On Vaccines Research & Development. This supposedly occurred March 15-17 2021, in Osaka, though in the absence of a venue or a Scientific Program, skepticism is understandable. The organisers took "Providing Foundations To Understand The Role Of Vaccines In Improving Health Across The Globe" as their theme, but in a fleeting moment of honesty about priorities they promoted it as "Providing a holistic experience of academic tourism".
Imagine my surprise to find that Giulio Tarro has accomplished nothing since his work as Albert Sabin's student in the late 60s / early 1970s, and all his prizes and titles and Nobel nominations are purchased or self-conferred. His incapacity explains his subsequent steady rise through the feudal ranks of Italian academia, as the Italian mediocracy has been compared to organised crime, in the way that the Baroni value incompetence in their minions as an unfakeable signal of loyalty (actual ability could easily lead to independence).
As for Tarro's collaboration with Sabin on herpesviruses as the cause of cancer, his main accomplishment then was to rob his mentor of reputation and several months' work, as Sabin pored through data and re-performed experiments while he traced the source of the fraudulent results.
Suffice to say that Tarro is yet another old friend of Forbetterscience (and of OcaSapiens). Sunnapalli Reddy Sekhar and Vijay Tippani Kumar, if you're reading this, and if you need more disgraced charlatans and mountebanks for your next mockademic con-job, there must be a few names left in Leonid's archives.
Enough of that digression. We are waiting to hear back from Prof Harald zur Hausen, 2008 Nobel Prizewinner in Physiology / Medicine, about his advertised talking-bear prostitute performing-bear status at at least four of these money-extraction opportunities. The claims of his attendance may be just embellishments, or leakage from alternative realities.
As ScientificFederation, our heroes assert that Prof. zur Hausen addressed the 13th International Conference And Expo On Nanotechnology & Nanomaterials on July 12-14 (theme : Exploring Novel Facets To The World In Nanotechnology), on the topic "Bacterial plasmid-derived infectious agents as a novel class linked to common human cancers (colon, breast and prostate)". The claim would be more plausible if the link to the Abstract Book led anywhere else but to a 404 Error, or if the Venue Address was more specific than just "Barcelona".
Wearing their TheScientistt hats, they promise his Plenary presence at the Global Summit on Cancer Research and Therapy (GSCR2021) in Marseille, November 11-13, 2021. Details of other speakers have stalled at the stage of "will be updated soon".
Also, the Global Summit on Women Health and Breast Cancer (WHBC2022) in Tokyo, April 21-23, 2022. His topic: "A novel class of infectious agents and their relationship to breast- and colon cancer".
This follows immediately after PHARMAMEET2022, International Meet on Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery Systems in Tokyo, April 18-20, 2022 (organized by Albedo Meetings) - saving Prof. zur Hausen an extra trip. This will be a star-studded event, with the other Plenary Speakers including Prof. Sir Tom Blundell, Director of Research at Cambridge (also listed as Chairman of the sorry charade); Terry Rabbitts FRS of the ICR; and ... wait... Shoenfeld again. Oh joy, more confirmatory emails to send.
The theft of Nobel Committee intellectual property (i.e. the Nobel medal as background adornment for webpages) is in keeping with the rest of SciFed ethics.
These phantasmagoric pseudo-seminars proliferate and pullulate beyond the capacity of one person to check the attendance of everyone who's listed. Readers are invited to trawl through the plethora of Speaker lists in search of familiar names. The border controls protecting New Zealand from COVID remain in force, making it unlikely that Prof. Olaf Diegel (of the University of Auckland, NZ) will attend 3D PRINTING-2021 in Paris (September 20-21). I have emailed him, asking if the promise of a Plenary Speech is reality-based, and (if it is) requesting his review of the event experience.
That said, it is plausible that Elias Aifantis (another old friend of FBS) will speak at the 2nd Global Summit and Expo on Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials (GSENN2022) in Copenhagen. For Ruggero Santilli is also a headline act, and he and Aifantis run in the same circles:
Sir Santilli, I should say: since his induction into the Equestrian Order of St Agatha by the Republic of San Marino, he insists on the honorific. I suspect that an opportunity to unfurl his list of self-assigned titles and accomplishments is all the incentive Sir Santilli needs to provide a Plenary Speech, requiring no other honorarium. Although not a Nobel Laureate, Sir Santilli boasts of having sockpuppets and meatpuppets to nominate him regularly to the Nobel Committee, which is practically the same thing.
What is it about Nanotech, by the way, that attracts these grifters? Do the researchers have more surplus funding to flush down the scamference toilet compared to other academic specialties, or do they just have less to fear from scrutiny by their funders?
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UPDATE: Leonid asked me to add something about 'Pagesconferences' as well, brought to us by 'Pangea Global Events'. The websites for these events are similar to those of the SciFed stable. This may just reflect the curriculum of web-design education in Hyderabad, as it is the work of a different grifter: Pavan Kumar Jalluri. His indefatigable skiving and unfamiliarity with English caught the attention of D. H. Kaye. I don't want to lead you too far this rabbit-hole... but just look at the speakers for Global Conference on Traditional and Alternative Medicine, March 14-16 2022, in Barcelona! GCTAM2022 is going to be epic.
Thomas Webster is there, still claiming Northeastern University as his affiliation. Bharat Aggarwal is a litigious vexation and an Alt-Med fraudster on an industrial scale, who stopped curing cancers with turmeric and left the University of Texas (M D Anderson Cancer Center) under a faked-results-shaped cloud back in 2015, but he still uses that affiliation for purposes of grifting. The cream of the jest, though, is the presence of Alireza Heidari, whose "California South University" is entirely his own invention.
This guy might deserve his own thread, because he has apparently set up a whole fake university website just to list his "more than one thousand reputed international awards, prizes, scholarships and honors".https://t.co/uNPX13DCLo
— Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) February 22, 2020
There are serious doubts about Heidari's very existence, for the only extant image of him is a Photoshop composition using a stock "library-shelves" background... he may be an elaborate hoax, or a way of flagging the parasitical predation of the 639 journals that recruited him as Editor, or a prolific paper-faking algorithm that gained sentience. This did not stop the International Conference on Immunology and Microbiology, November 15-17 2021, in Luxembourg City, from promoting Heidari to its Scientific Board - this time representing the American International Standards Association, which is just as non-existent as CSU.
More relevantly, Prof. zur Hausen has evidently succumbed to Pangean blandishments and will legitimise ICIM2021 with an invited speech (along with the egregious Tarro). I can't help wondering how many perfectly cromulent invitation he has to turn down, to leave spare time for all these scamferences.
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* Other characteristics include rogues-galleries of Plenary Speaker headshots that suffered Procrustean compression or elongation from their original dimensions to fit into a square grid, with grotesque consequences; and annoyingly animated websites, pimped out with scrolling image carousels and endless activity and every blinking pop-up distraction that the HTML-jockeys could find. 'Understated elegance' is not a visual-communication virtue taught in Hyderabad schools of web design.
** In lieu of those vanished SciFed journals, MPDI outlets are listed as Journal Partners for several of these congress-shaped phenomena. This is in keeping with what we know of MPDI.
*** As any fule kno, a Cachet is a small cache.
