Im Rahmen unseres Philosophischen Kolloquiums laden wir herzlich ein zum Lunch Time Talk mit einem Vortrag von

M.A. Alexander Christian (Univ. Düsseldorf): "Features of fake scientific conferences"

In recent years, scientists from all fields of research have noticed the rise of a varied scholarly black market, including predatory publishers, predatory journals, fake science metrics, and potentially fraudulent institutions like diploma mills. Some predatory publishers have developed lucrative businesses under the pretext of open access publishing, running journals which provide no proper editorial control over submissions. Expanding their business endeavor beyond unethical publishing to organizing conferences, which provide little to no value for scientific discourse and whose attendance means a waste or even misappropriation of scarce research funding, was the next logical step.

In this talk, I will first explain how so called predatory / fake conferences emerged from predatory open access publishing in the early 2000s. Then, I identify features of such conferences, like a lack of proper editorial control over submissions, inadequate schedules, and aggressive marketing, in order to systematically distinguish between ordinary, dubious, and probably fraudulent conferences. Finally, I unpack some of the various conflicts between fake scientific conferences and principles of responsible conduct of research and discuss means to cope with fake conferences.

About the speaker: Alexander Christian M.A. studied philosophy, sociology and biology at the Heinrich Heine University and writes his doctoral thesis about good scientific practice in biomedical research. He is a research fellow at the Chair of Theoretical Philosophy and the Assistant Director of the Düsseldorf Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science.