Keith S. Taber
Dubious conference invitations
I have raised the issue of dodgy conference invitations – such as being asked to talk at a conference in a field far from one's own, and to pay for the privilege of doing so – before in this blog, BUT a recent invitation from Kostas Chiotopoulos takes the top prize for the most desperate and pointless attempt by a commercial conference organiser to tempt academics who have given up the will to engage in meaningful scholarship.
The subject line of the email was:
"Rome, Italy, May 26-28, 2018. Malta Island, June 22-24, 2018. Mallorca Island, Spain, July 14-17, 2018 kst24@cam.ac.uk Hard Copy of Proceedings available again* kst24@cam.ac.uk A Certificate from the University will be given to all the Invited Speakers.."
Not exactly succinct, but then I'm sitting writing this while listening to (Rick Wakeman's excellent) 'The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table' so I cannot claim to be inherently adverse to a long title!
Perhaps Kostas Chiotopoulos knows about some very clever marketing principles, but I could not help wondering:
- why does my email address need to appear twice in the subject of the email?
- what does the asterisk indicate – was the subject even longer originally and Kostas Chiotopoulos took pity on me?
- Does a second full stop at the end of a sentence add emphasis?
Of course, one thing that was missing from the subject line was the topic of the conferences. Were these conferences on science education, or some closely related field? Perhaps that was the clever marketing ploy – Kostas Chiotopoulos got me intrigued enough to read the whole email in the expectation that the conferences would not actually be relevant to me, but wanting to check just in case he might prove me wrong!
However, it seems Kostas Chiotopoulos is even more wily than that! So I carefully read the email and find that I am invited to be an 'invited lecturer' at conferences in:
- Paris, or in Rome, Italy
- or in Malta Island, or in Mallorca Island, Spain
- or even [sic] in Corfu Island, Greece, or in Dubrovnik, Croatia
- or in any London, UK [n.b., there is only one London, UK I'm aware of] or in Rome, Italy
- or in Bern, Switzerland, or in Madrid, Spain
- or in Cambridge, UK, or in Venice, March 2019 …
I'm told that "A certificate from the Universities that sponsor each particular event will be given to" (I'm guessing my University, Cambridge, is not issuing the certificate for the Cambridge conference!)
I'm told my contributions can be published in journals published by the likes of "…SAGE, Springer Verlag, Elsevier…" – publishers one might expect would have their own editorial and peer review procedures.
So what information is missing?
Well I cannot complain that Kostas Chiotopoulos is inviting me to talk at a conference outside my field, as the invitation contains absolutely no information about the fields, subjects, disciplines, themes, or topics, of any of these conferences.
So it seems that things have got so bad (cf. Taber, 2018) that commercial companies are now prepared to sell 'invited lecturer' status to anyone who is prepared to pay, to talk about anything they like, without any pretence that these are serious academic conferences that are actually about something.
Retirement, take me soon.
Source cited:
- Taber, K. S. (2018). The end of academic standards? A lament on the erosion of scholarly values in the post-truth world. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 19(1), 9-14. doi:10.1039/C7RP90012K [Free access]
Read about 'Conferences and poor academic practice'
First published 5th April 2018 at http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/kst24/
