Dear Fil,

Thanks for your notice to the list. If you spend a few minutes on the WASET web site, you will see all the earmarks of fake conference promotion.

First, check the vast number of conferences they run across an impossibly board stretch of disciplines. They manage conferences in forty (40!) disciplines. No serious academy or research organisation can manage this kind of stretch. Serious research societies such as The Design Society or The Design Research Society have a central conference every year — every two years in the case of the IASDR member societies. In addition, they may support special interest groups or focus conferences.

In contrast, WASET runs conferences across 40 disciplines — including disciplines outside their supposed academy focus.

http://www.waset.org/Conferences

But it gets worse — under each of these 40 disciplines, WASET runs a string of conferences.

Take the example of Electrical and Computer Engineering Conferences:

http://www.waset.org/conference/electrical-and-computer-engineering

They are running ten or twelve conferences every month in 2015. WASET seems to be running 
 
Then, of you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see that they purport to publish 10 journals in different engineering fields.

In some areas such as the humanities and social sciences, they are running up to 40 conferences in a single month.

This is a conference production organisation, not a scientific academy. There can be only one reason to produce this many conferences — making money on gullible university teachers who feel pressed to show that they are doing research.

They are making preposterous claims for indexing, as well. The web site announces: "The post conference proceedings will be published in the International Science Index and submitted to be indexed in the Thomson Reuters, CiteSeerX, Google Books and Google Scholar, EBSCO, SCOPUS, ERA and ProQuest."

This is meaningless. Google Books and Google Scholar are search engine services, not indexes. EBSCO is a content provider. CiteSeerX is an experimental digital library and index in the computer sciences. ERA is not an index — it is the acronym of a national university research ranking exercise. SCOPUS is an index, but it will not carry journals or proceedings from a fake production company. Anyone can submit to SCOPUS — just as you can “submit” anyone’s name for a Nobel Prize. That doesn’t mean the Nobel prize committees will take a nomination from anyone other than qualified nominators. 

Then there is the case of Thomson Reuters. This is a distinguished publishing and information services company — they own ISI and publish the Web of Knowledge indexes, but no one submits conference proceedings to Thomson Reuters itself. This claim suggests that the conference service is not merely managed by fakes. It is managed by people who don’t even know how to counterfeit the appearance of an academic conference.

Jeffrey Beall lists WASET in its list of predatory publishers. Beall’s list is carefully researched.

http://scholarlyoa.com

This organisation is flagged as fake by The Design Society and flagged as predatory by Beall’s Scholarly Open Access list. The evidence of the organisation web site supports their evaluation. It is fair to state that this evaluation is definitive. 

This is a fake conference. 

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia

Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 


 


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