Door-to-door subscription scams: the dark side of The New York Times

"An article appeared on the front page of the Sunday New York Times purporting to expose a “parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them”. The story describes the experience of some unnamed scientists who accepted an email invitation to a conference, which then charged them for participating, and of some other scientists who submitted papers to a journal they had never heard based on an email solicitation and were later charged hefty fees for doing so. Somehow, in the mind of author Gina Kolata, this is all PLoS’s fault, quoting someone who calls this phenomenon the 'dark side of open access'. Here is her logic ...  There’s so much that is wrong with this I don’t know where to start.  First, this IS a real phenomenon. I get several emails every day from some dubious conference inviting me to speak or some sketchy journal asking me to be on their editorial board or to submit an article. However these solicitations are so obviously not legit, I can’t believe anyone falls for them. To suggest this is some kind of dangerous trend based on a few anecdotes is ridiculous.  And yes, a lot of these suspect journals charge authors for publishing their works, just like open access journals like PLoS do. But suggesting, as the article does, that scam conferences/journals exist because of the rise of open access publishing is ridiculous. It’s the logical equivalent of blaming newspapers like the NYT for people who go door-to-door selling fake magazine subscriptions.  Long before the Internet, publishers discovered that launching new journals was like printing money – something Elsevier specialized in for decades, launching hundreds of new journals with hastily assembled editorial boards and then turning around and demanding that libraries subscribe to these journals as part of their 'Big Deal' bundles of journals. These journals succeeded because there are always researchers looking for a place to put their papers, and many of these new journals greased the wheels by having fairly lax standards for publication.  The same is true for conferences. For as long as I can remember I’ve been receiving solicitations to attend and/or speak at conferences organized by for-profit firms like Cambridge Health Tech that seem to cobble together sets of speakers from whomever they could get to accept – taking advantage of scientists’ desire to put 'invited speaker' on their CVs – and then charging scientists, often from industry where travel budgets are bigger, to attend. I am sure some of these meetings are useful to some people (I’ve never been to meetings like this, some people tell me they’re basically junkets with little scientific merit, others say they are very useful) – but the idea that profiteering on people’s desire for prestige in science is something that came onto the scene with open access publishing is patently absurd.  The real explanation for the things described in the article is that it’s insanely easy to create conferences and journals and to send out blasts of emails to thousands of scientists hoping a few will take the bait. It’s science’s version of the Nigerian banking scams – something far more deserving of laughter than hand-wringing on the front page of the NYT.  But if Gina Kolata and the NYT are really concerned about scams in science publishing, they should look into the $10 BILLION DOLLARS of largely public money that subscription publishers take in every year in return for giving the scientific community access to the 90% of papers that are not published in open access journals – papers that scientists gave to the journals for free! ..."