As an academic myself, we get spam emails advertising conferences just like this. It is not an achievement (of any sort), and what you're doing poorly represents both the academic system, and yourself.
Well I mean.... calm down, this was done as an experiment by the author to see what kind of corrupt shakedown his students were being run through.
These things need to be tested in order to improve the academic system. Otherwise the misinformation continues (in the form of some actually believing the claims of peer review etc.) and people may be duped by a paper that is seemingly innocuous but where the research is faked.
(Here is a recent article that is indicative of how dangerous the academic review process is getting. IMHO it should be valued above novel research at this point -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6968676)
I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement. However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an achievement.
Hence, this expose to improve awareness.
I am not sure how I have poorly represented the academic system and myself by doing that, so could you elaborate?
What astrowizicist is trying to say is that any student - let alone faculty - who is falling for a spamference is clearly too stupid to work in academia.
I think the real point of this article is that it's not realistic to expect every one of these students to have two high-quality published papers as a graduation requirement. This leads to and fuels the bogus conferences.
You should never submit any work to a conference or journal you do not know and follow beforehand.
To be more explicit: a good rule of thumb is that if you are not familiar with the publications of at least some of the committee or, if you were asked to suggest reviewers for you research out of the scientific committee members, you'd be hard pressed to name a few, you should not submit anything.
Your students should know that. If none explained something similar to the above, then you should have.
As you get older, I find I only follow 1-2 quality publications. I often get invited to dubious / shady conferences and I just hit the spam button. All of my peers do the same.
Why shouldn't you submit to such a conference? Because you don't know if it's legit or not?
I don't think the students care if it's legit or not. They care about getting papers published so they can graduate. And apparently their schools don't care if the conferences are legit or not either. So everyone is happy, we all win!
the only actual beneficiary i can think of is the people charging students to publish without even having to deal with the overhead of hiring someone to read the damn thing
I was being somewhat sarcastic, but I'd suggest that students and professors get some self-interested benefit from the system, or it wouldn't have come to exist.
The schools get to make it look like they are producing high-quality students with publications, without the professors actually having to do much work to make this true.
The students get to graduate, and get a publication credit, regardless of the quality of their work, so long as they can pay.
heh i know u were. i get what youre saying here but my issue with that is it just leads to like watered-down pseudo-journals of questionable reputation.
it almost feels like a better alternative would be for the students to run their own informal conferences & publish through an open publishing network (a lot of these are emerging in academia to subvert all the licensing BS from the journals)
What the OP has done certainly does present a poor representation of the academic system, as a corrupt shakedown system that's milking students for easy cash. Is this incorrect? No. As you said, we get spam emails for conferences like this -- but if students think it's a requirement to publish in order to graduate, why not answer that spam?
Corruption is a huge factor in academic publishing, which relatively well-off and well-connected academics in the UK and US may not realize. A lot of countries trying to increase the visibility and prestige of their academic programs have stupid publishing quotas set by bureaucrats that make less-connected or less-knowledgeable academics ripe targets for these scams. Even in Italy, an EU country with a long academic history in mathematics, rules put in place to combat nepotism favor publication rates that are at best simply orthogonal to measuring the quality of a mathematician's output. India has tons of new colleges and universities and many young academics trying to prove themselves, as well as a recent influx of state funding. The OP's post is an important expose of some of the shenanigans occurring in this new ecosystem.
As an academic myself, we get spam emails advertising conferences just like this. It is not an achievement (of any sort), and what you're doing poorly represents both the academic system, and yourself.