A blog this week by Editage states: “Most researchers are aware of predatory scholarly publishers. However, predatory scholarly conferences pose a new threat to scholarly communications as researchers find themselves inundated with spam emails soliciting their attendance at these meetings. All researchers should become aware of the dangers of submitting their work to and attending questionable, low-quality, and even predatory scholarly conferences.”.

The author of the blog provides a list of some typical characteristics of questionable conferences:

• They are broad in coverage and typically combine several research fields into one conference.
• The conference uses spam email to solicit papers and registrations. These usually use free email addresses.
• Information about the conference organiser is unclear or missing, or the organiser is not a well-known.
• Researchers submitting abstracts for peer-reviewed conference presentations usually receive word of acceptance very quickly