Paper Accepted…Unless the Letter Was Forged - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Predation. It’s discussed all the time. Predatory journals are scamming unsuspecting authors by promising quick publication, and low, low fees to a never-heard-of-before open access journal. Alternatively, it may be true that some authors are the ones taking advantage of low cost OA in order to push through shoddy work and get credit for it. Conferences are another headache. Researchers attend conferences to get their work published and to network. There is no shortage of conferences promising to do just that only for attendees to realize when they get there that all is not what was advertised. In fact, a new website with a familiar name is offering attendees help in identifying these conferences.

Another scam seems to be taking hold in certain parts of the world. Over the last 5 years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has become aware of seven fake acceptance letters for our journals. Here’s how this goes:

An author contacts us and says, “Thank you for accepting my paper. Your letter said that the paper would be in the December issue but I looked and it’s not there. Please inform me of the new publication date.”

We’ve never seen this paper. The author helpfully provides a copy of the acceptance letter.

The letterhead is similar to ours, though we don’t send accept letters on this letterhead and a map was added to the background. There is no actual journal title. The letter does promise a publication date, which we never provide. There is an editor signature. That’s an ASCE Editor, but not his signature. The other signature belongs to my boss, though his title is wrong.

The letter, as if to convey more legitimacy, includes logos for DOAJ, Crossref, and other various indices. The DOI prefix is incorrect and ASCE does not have an Open Access journal, so none are included in DOAJ...."