Yes, I'm seeing a huge amount of that. both in Civil Society (fake conferences directed to mostly Africans. "please send processing fees and we will send you tickets, hotel accommodation, per dia etc.", and now multiple pay for play journals and conferences--some outright scams others completely commercial and directed to very low grade Promotion & Tenure committees. It is virtually without cost or risk to set up an academic journal now -- give it a fancy name and then troll the Internet for folks to jump at the chance to be on semi-phoney editorial boards, publish in non-peer reviewed "peer reviewed journals" that sort of thing.
The other element is that there is no business model for legit open access journals of which there are now very many (except for the potentially sleazy pay for play. This is a major problem that academe/research funders are just now getting around to address. The OJS software system (developed at UBC and now hosted from SFU is the platform of choice for literally thousands of legit open access journals http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs like the one that I edit. (Take a look at the quite amazing stats http://www.ci-journal.net/reports/ M Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. Editor in Chief: Journal of Community Informatics web: http://ci-journal.net email: [email protected] From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2013 9:46 AM To: [email protected]; 'Futurework' Subject: [Ottawadissenters] FW: For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia - NYTimes.com Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events. Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon "the dark side of open access," the movement to make scholarly publications freely available. The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them. Open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, known as PLoS. Such articles were listed in databases like PubMed, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, and selected for their quality. But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. "Most people don't know the journal universe," Dr. Goodman said. "They will not know from a journal's title if it is for real or not." 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