Over the past couple weeks I’ve received several emails informing me about two scholarly publishers / conference organizers and their intentional use of duplicate or nearly-duplicate journal titles and conference names.
One of the most prolific conference-name copiers is WASET, the so-called World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology that is not really an academy at all. In the image above, we see that WASET is holding a conference next year in Chicago, the International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology (ICTTP). They’re also holding an earlier version of the bogus conference next month in Osaka.
The real International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology will be held next year in Brisbane, Qld., Australia, and the conference only takes place every five years. It’s organized by the Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety — Queensland. If this is your field, I recommend that you completely ignore the WASET and head to Brisbane instead.
More OMICS Group Copying
OMICS Group, a predatory publisher from Hyderabad, India, likes to copy or closely copy journal titles to trick researchers into thinking their low-quality knock-off is the real thing. Here are two examples.
Insight Medical Publishing, also known as iMedPub, is a trashy imprint or brand now owned by OMICS Group. They’re currently launching a new title, the Journal of Clinical Epigenetics. Their spam email refers to it only as Clinical Epigenetics at times, a tactic to fool people into believing the spam is for Clinical Epigenetics, the official journal of the Clinical Epigenetics Society, and now published by BioMed Central.
Taylor & Francis publishes the Journal of Dual Diagnosis, and OMICS Group has also ripped off this title. Again, their ImedPub imprint publishes the copycat journal Dual Diagnosis: Open Access.
OMICS Group is also organizing a conference called Dual Diagnosis, and the spam email for that conference is signed by a person with a familiar name: