The scam about fake journals/conferences

Publishing in peer-reviewed research journals and publishing/presenting at conferences are the standard world-wide benchmarks of reviewing progress of an academician/researcher.

Many of us are aware of many fake conferences and fake journals. These claim to be "peer-reviewed" and even report to have a dubiously high impact factor for themselves, but are "fake". They promise review within a week and in fact often are more prompt: acceptance within a day! They accept each paper and make good business out of the publishing metrics. Almost everybody in the academia is aware of this. However, there are some students and young researchers, who unaware of this scam, innocently submit genuine research papers and take pride in having published a paper. [Apologies to them if this work digs out journals/conferences that they have published in.]

Such fake conferences/journals continue to mushroom across the world making much profit out the academic needs to publish, and we in academia are encouraging this by:

Of course, there is huge damage to the reputation/integrity of the whole community due to this.

Some of the well-known and classical examples of fake publishing include the ones by Alan Sokal (in Sociology), Bogdanov brothers (in Physics), Navin Kabra (Sholay related recent conference paper): precise references to this will be put up here soon.

I attempted to bring to light this racket by submitting computer-generated papers to two conferences and three journals. The script and software was developed by Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo (available at https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ )

List of those conferences/journals having accepted my paper as of now:

The Rome conference acceptance letter also gave some profound looking statistics.

The SCIgen website needs us to put author names, and it generates a pdf-file (and also lets us download the tex file.) The website uses so-called "context-free grammar", as the authors of the paper-generator program say.

The program also makes figures and references making the paper look scientific indeed!

This website has been around since 10+ years.

My paper's abstract already tells explicitly that the paper is "generated"! So obviously even the abstract has not got read by any reviewer of these peer-reviewed conferences and "Impact Factor 6" journals. The paper was accepted. (Of course, I am not wasting money registering/travelling and hence the paper will not appear in the proceedings/journal.)

Thank you for reading. Your comments are welcome.

Important files (manuscript and acceptance letters):

Madhu (31st August, 2017)