Checking a journal or meeting before submitting

An unsolicited invitation, a familiar-sounding name or a plausible website settles nothing about a journal or a meeting. Checking a venue before sending it work or money means treating the invitation as a reason to look, confirming that the venue is the one it appears to be, and running the published checklists for journals and for meetings.

Unsolicited invitations

Predatory journals very often contact authors aggressively, emailing them, advertising to them and asking them to place an article in the journal. ¹ Although the pressure to publish, and increasingly to publish open access, is significant, writers and researchers must be cautious in choosing venues and in responding to invitations from unfamiliar publications to review or submit work. ²

In one industry leader's view, a medical communicator needs a simple awareness of what to do when a predatory journal makes contact: recognise it, recognise its URL, and warn the authors if it comes from somewhere suspicious. ³

One previously published author receives an unsolicited invitation to submit at least weekly. ⁴ Another author has found that a glance at the journal's name or its website was enough to tell that such invitations did not come from serious publications. ⁴ In one case, an invitation sent by the journal's editor himself carried three subtle grammatical oddities, which prompted a check of the journal. ⁴ The journal had a large international editorial board, but no impact factor could be found listed, and a recent issue carried a report that could not be found on PubMed and that, in the checker's judgement, any reputable journal would have rejected by return email. ⁴ The invitation's submission link did not mention a processing fee, and a search of another site revealed that it was $1549. ⁴ A doctor who sent two articles to a case-reports journal after an emailed invitation was billed for publication once the articles were accepted, and the fee was eventually waived. ⁵

Lesser-known but valid publications, such as small interdisciplinary journals or journals from developing countries, should not be dismissed. ⁶ Of two invitations one writer received to peer-review or submit manuscripts, one came from a questionable-sounding publication and the other from an unfamiliar overseas journal. ⁶ Some investigation showed both journals to be reputable, and the invitations led to rewarding experiences that would have been missed had they been discarded too soon. ⁶

Two writers who had published essays on how to identify a predatory journal were then targeted by one, and applied their own published method to it. ⁷ Within five months of the essays appearing in Medical Writing in June 2020, they had received ten invitations to review, to contribute and to join an editorial board, all from one questionable journal. ^{7, 8} The first came in September 2020, and the tenth had arrived by December. ⁸

The writers believe that social media sharing may have played a pivotal role in publicising their work among their peers and others. ⁹ Medical Writing is indexed in Scopus, Google Scholar, the US National Library of Medicine, ResearchGate and EBSCO. ¹⁰ Its articles are regularly promoted on LinkedIn and EMWA's Twitter account. ⁹ The journal likely used the email addresses attached to the essays. ⁹

The disparities began with the senders' names and email addresses. ¹¹ Each email came from a different editor's name and a different domain, some .org and some .com. ^{9, 8} The domain of each address differed from that of the links inside the email for more information, which differed in turn from the journal's own website. ⁹ The emails seemed to follow one or two templates, yet each differed in colour scheme and slightly in wording. ^{9, 10} They were flagged as spam. ⁸ For editors supposedly representing an academic publication, their sentences were awkward and convoluted, both in the emails and on the journal's website. ^{10, 9} The journal's aims and scope had nothing to do with the essays, yet its editors claimed to be greatly impressed by the writers' papers, which were on how to identify predatory journals, and referred to an abstract neither essay had. ⁹ The writers also did not meet the journal's own published requirements for reviewers, editorial board members and editor-in-chief, which raises the question of why it actively invited them to apply. ⁸

Look-alike and hijacked venues

Alongside established journals and meetings runs a parallel world of pseudo-academia. ⁵ Scientists who believed they had been selected to present at the meeting of the leading professional association of insect scientists discovered too late that they had in fact been signed up for a separate event with a nearly identical name. ⁵ Its speakers had been recruited by email rather than vetted by leading academics, and those who agreed to appear were later charged a fee. ⁵

A hijacked journal is a fake website for a respectable scientific journal, set up by a cybercriminal to offer physicians and scientists a venue to publish their papers for a fee. ¹² It uses a fake domain name, or sometimes the legitimate journal's own domain name, stolen when the publisher fails to pay the required registration fee. ¹² Academics receive emails inviting them to submit, often to journal sites that seem to have nothing to do with their field of expertise. ¹² The fake and the legitimate site can be hard to tell apart: following the links to both sites of one journal left it uncertain which was authentic. ¹²

In the move to open access that the United Kingdom mandated for all commercial publishers, a few publishers discovered that one of their journals had been hijacked by a predatory publisher who had copied the publisher's website to a slightly different URL. ¹³ No link on the copy worked except the "pay here" button, which led directly to the predator's site. ¹³ Such tactics call for extreme care and for staying on the lookout. ¹³

To mislead authors, some predatory journals carry names similar or even identical to those of well-known established journals. ^{14, 15} This is a form of hijacking, because such journals aim to divert submissions intended for genuine journals. ^{14, 15} By misleading authors, they seek scientifically sound content that they can then use to obscure the nature of their business. ^{14, 15}

The two writers who had received ten invitations from one questionable journal searched for its title rather than following the links in the emails. ⁹ The title closely resembled at least two other journals, one apparently from a reputable publisher and the other of questionable origin. ⁹ The search led to two websites for the same title that looked reasonably professional at face value, one blue and one red, until closer examination brought out the disparities. ⁹ The publishing group behind the journal published 552 open-access journals, of which 253 (46%) were a variant of "International Journal of" (149), "American Journal of" (96) or "European Journal of" (8), borrowing the names of legitimate publications. ^{9, 8}

Weighing a venue

Researchers must dig deep before choosing where to publish, and they have all the skills to do it. ¹⁶ Authors should do their own research and weigh each journal against a set of selection criteria. ¹⁷

Predatory publishers resemble counterfeit money: they may appear authentic, and only a very close, analytical look determines their legitimacy. ¹⁸ Because predatory journals may go to extreme lengths to convince authors of their legitimacy, the subtle signs of deception need watching for. ^{18, 19, 20} If something seems questionable or feels wrong, it probably is. ^{18, 20, 21} Researchers should also trust their instincts. ^{18, 22} Predatory journals are money-making enterprises, so when confronted with them it is worth keeping that driving force in mind and staying alert to their deceptive practices. ²² The best defence against the predators is common sense, tempered with a healthy dose of caution. ^{23, 21} Awareness of the predators is the first step to avoiding them. ²³

Some new start-up journals and publishers are legitimate, but checking one calls for caution and a look beneath the surface. ²⁴ To one co-author of the joint position statement on predatory publishing, the publishers of most concern are the mega predatory journal publishers, which are still morphing and still finding new devious pathways. ²⁴

No single method is foolproof, and the best process combines techniques: applying the criteria for predatory journals, looking for the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals or other online directories, and asking senior colleagues whether they have heard of it. ²⁵ As predatory open-access publications increase in number, researchers need to be able to recognise their practices, and while the literature defining them is thorough, few publications advise researchers how to recognise them in practice. ²⁶ Recognising them draws on Beall's list of potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers, the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Eigenfactor Index of Open Access Fees; on knowing the prominent and stealthy tricks such publications use, email and conference invitations among them; and on the common sense of new researchers and their mentors. ²⁶

A predatory journal can be hard to tell from a proper one, as one medical writing agency found. ²⁷ A client proposed an open-access journal as the target for an article the agency had edited. ²⁷ The journal was not on the available predatory journal lists, its website claimed full peer review, the publication fee was high but somewhat reasonable, and its displayed impact factor of 0.5 to 1.0 looked plausible for a paper that was decent but not exceptional. ²⁷ The agency formatted the article and the author submitted it. ²⁷

The next day the author was told the paper had been accepted in "Pre QC" and was asked for permission to publish, and a fee was mentioned while the paper was still under review. ²⁷ The author accepted the fee, and a day later an invoice arrived, payable within three days, while the editorial office described the article as in the final stage of publication without a single reviewer's comment. ²⁷ This course of events alarmed the agency, and closer research then showed that it was a predatory journal owned by a very aggressive publisher, and that the impact factor claimed on its webpage could not be found in the Journal Citation Reports. ²⁷

Directories, lists and tools

Predatory journals have become better and more sophisticated over time, for example by taking submissions through online submission systems rather than as email attachments, and researchers are still being trapped by them. ²⁸ In choosing a journal, authors must be careful and limit their search to journals indexed in Web of Science, Medline, Scopus or the Directory of Open Access Journals, or to journals published by known learned societies or publishers, with further guidance available from Think. Check. Submit. or from one of the many journal selector sites online. ²⁸

Well-regarded peer-reviewed journals are listed in databases such as PubMed. ⁵ Journals found in PubMed need care, because predatory journals can sometimes be found through PubMed searches that retrieve articles deposited in PubMed Central. ²⁸

The Directory of Open Access Journals lists legitimate open-access journals and grants some a seal for a high level of openness, adherence to best practice and high publishing standards; in September 2019 it listed 13,776 journals in 130 countries. ²⁵ The Directory is not a complete list of legitimate open-access journals, so absence from it does not make a journal predatory, and listing does not guarantee legitimacy, though users can report a listed journal with questionable practices. ²⁵ The Think. Check. Submit. online checklist, developed by a coalition of scholarly publishing organisations, is a useful tool for systematising the analysis of a journal. ^{25, 8, 29} It is merely a way to guide research into a particular journal and to bring all the criteria together. ²⁵ Think. Check. Submit. and the Directory of Open Access Journals should be consulted when preparing to submit research for publication. ²²

Whether a journal is a good scientific journal rather than a predatory one can be checked on a whitelist of open-access journals that meet the normal scientific requirements. ^{1, 30} One online blacklist, whose keeper the speaker recommending it did not know, listed four journals with "veterinary" in their titles, and it can be checked for awareness of what exists. ³⁰

Although Beall's list is no longer available, numerous online resources help authors, medical writers and editors. ²¹ One experienced medical editor recommends a combination of resources: the archived copies of Beall's lists, out of date but still a good place to start, though not the only resource; the newer whitelists and blacklists, such as Cabells', which are pay-to-play services; Think. Check. Submit., a collaboration of industry and professional societies whose three-step system is easy to use and available in many languages; Laine and Winkler's guidance on identifying predatory or pseudo-journals on the World Association of Medical Editors' website; and, for meetings, Cobey and colleagues' guidance in the Journal of Oncology Practice on navigating presumed predatory conference invitations. ^{23, 31} A quick web search finds the archived copies of Beall's lists. ²³ A news report in Nature on the rise of questionable open-access operators included a checklist on how to perform due diligence before submitting to a journal or a publisher. ⁵ University systems are also trying to help their investigators research legitimate journals: the University of California San Diego, for example, was beta-testing a journal evaluation checker. ²⁴

The journal that invited the two writers did not hold up when its indexing, peer review and memberships were checked. ^{11, 8, 32} Its homepage claimed listing in 14 abstracting and indexing databases, most of them unfamiliar, and checking every one gave this result: ^{9, 11}

• The journal was indexed in eight. Three of them were dubious-looking paid indexes that displayed their membership fees prominently and whose indexing criteria were simply a valid ISSN and at least two published issues, which every journal meets, legitimate or not.
• One stated that it provides no indexing service and that any journal claiming to be indexed in it should be suspected.
• Three links were dead.
• The journal was not in two.
• One was a career portal rather than a database. ^{11, 8, 32}

Peer review was mentioned repeatedly in the emails, but the process was not clearly outlined on the website. ^{8, 32} No impact factor could be readily determined; it was listed as waiting although the first issue had appeared more than five years earlier. ⁸ The publisher was not a member of COPE, the journal was not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the publisher did not belong to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers' Association. ³² A legitimate journal, by contrast, explains its charges fully, states the amount, and takes payment only after peer review. ³²

The journal and its publisher failed every list and directory. ⁸ That is a major point in confirming that a journal is predatory, but listings should not be the only source of information, because the number of predatory titles is rising steadily, blacklists are hard to keep up to date, and predatory journals sometimes slip into whitelists unnoticed. ⁸ The writers adapted Think. Check. Submit. as the template for this check. ^{8, 29}

Signs of a predatory journal

One set of criteria identifies predatory journals by their lack of scientific rigour: a poor or non-existent peer-review process and little or no editorial oversight, to facilitate rapid publication and so ensure receipt of the article processing charge. ³³ Such journals are usually not indexed in established bibliometric databases, although they often claim legitimate indexing. ³³ They do not indicate how their content will be archived in perpetuity, a key feature of standard online-only journals. ³³ They often have titles that mimic well-known authentic journals, to confuse prospective authors. ³³ For many of them, the charge is an order of magnitude cheaper than for legitimate open-access journals. ³³

Compared with scholarly biomedical journals, predatory journals often include a country of origin in their title, advertise a generic multidisciplinary field and take advantage of the publish-or-perish culture, especially targeting postdoctoral students and faculty seeking tenure. ¹⁷

The red-flag criteria Jeffrey Beall described for predatory open-access publishers include the publisher's owner being named as editor of every journal it publishes, no individual being named as a journal's editor, no formal editorial or review board, and no academic information, such as institutional affiliation, about the editor, the editorial staff or the board members. ⁴

Typical signs are emails soliciting submissions with promises of fast, easy publication; fees that are suspiciously high or low and very often payable on submission; a legitimate-sounding name that is a variation on an established journal's; possibly an unprofessional website with fake addresses and grammatical errors; and absence from recognised citation systems such as PubMed and from accredited directories. ²⁵

In one real case, a publisher's website looked legitimate at first, but many of its elements proved to be red flags: a questionable mailing address, indexing advertised only as "coming soon", publication charges due at submission, journals in many disciplines from the one publisher, poor English across the site, published articles of dubious quality, and no request for conflict-of-interest statements. ³⁴

Both websites of the journal that invited the two writers displayed the article processing charges prominently. ⁹ The journal's webpage included various money-transfer services. ²⁹ The publishing group behind it prominently advertised rapid publication, generally in 50 to 90 days. ⁹ Its contact details, a North American phone number and address, led to a rental office block in New York whose website listed only offices for hire and said nothing about who rented them. ^{9, 8} Whether the group was physically located there could not be determined. ^{9, 8} The journal listed 68 editorial board members and 35 reviewers, and listing reviewers on a journal's webpage is not common practice. ⁸

The publishing group was present on Twitter with over 1,000 followers, on Facebook with over 4,000 likes, and on LinkedIn with over 1,000 followers and more than 100 listed employees, posting popular science and its own articles. ³² The journal had six volumes of six issues, each holding between one and five articles, so 36 to 180 articles in all. ³² A small share of them looked scientifically sound, including preclinical research and the validation of a new analytical method by authors from the pharmaceutical company that developed it. ³² The writers concluded with confidence that both the journal and its publisher were predatory, with the characteristic promise of fast publication for a fee, and that the low quality of individual articles suggested there might have been no peer review at all. ^{32, 35}

The criteria one experienced medical editor considers most useful for identifying a predatory publisher or journal are bad grammar, meaning numerous typos, sentence fragments, inconsistent capitalisation and horrible punctuation, and poor website design, "think Web design circa 1995". ^{23, 21} Lists of editorial boards or congress faculty are a further warning when they contain more members than expected, are more geographically diverse or drawn from widely divergent fields, or carry headshots that appear pirated from other sources, being fuzzy, pixelated or widely varied in background. ²¹ The people on such lists are often unaware that they have been "virtually abducted" onto these fictitious boards or faculty. ²¹

There is no golden rule for identifying a predatory journal, but predatory journals share certain common characteristics, and one checklist summarises the critical items of two free online checklists, the Think. Check. Submit. checklist and the Ottawa Hospital Centre for Journalology's. ^{36, 37} The totality of the evidence is weighed: failing one item does not necessarily indicate a predatory journal, while failing several makes the likelihood of one high. ^{38, 36, 37, 39} The signs are:

• no membership of a reputable open-access association such as the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, the World Association of Medical Editors, the Committee on Publication Ethics or the Directory of Open Access Journals; membership of an international open-access organisation such as the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association or the Committee on Publication Ethics is a good sign, because these associations carefully scrutinise journals before admitting them ^{38, 36, 40, 41, 39, 8}
• spelling and grammar mistakes and poor web design, such as low-resolution logos or overlapping text, because fraudulent publishers tend not to invest in design or proofreading ^{38, 36, 37, 39}
• fees not clearly shown on the website ^{38, 39}
• editorial board members whose identity cannot be verified, because names may be invented or genuine professionals listed without their knowledge ^{38, 36, 37, 39, 42}
• a publisher whose location, telephone numbers or email address cannot be verified ^{38, 39}
• poorly written articles, by authors and from institutions the reader has never heard of ^{38, 39}
• a submission route that is only an email address rather than a recognised submission system such as ScholarOne, which should ring alarm bells because few genuine publishers lack one ^{38, 36, 37, 39}
• no participation in a recognised digital archiving system such as CLOCKSS ^{38, 36, 41, 39}
• no inclusion in a recognised index such as PubMed Central ^{38, 39}
• a claimed impact factor that cannot be found in the Journal Citation Reports, since faking impact factors and indexing is very common among predatory journals ^{38, 36, 37, 39}
• no policies on disclosing conflicts of interest, and no statements on copyright, intellectual property or publishing licences ^{38, 39}

Medical writers should read the joint position statement on predatory publishing issued by AMWA, EMWA and the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP), which is available on the associations' websites, EMWA's among them. ^{43, 1, 44} The statement, issued in July 2019, notes that the large increase in scientific journals over the previous 15 years, predatory ones among them, can make predatory journals difficult to tell apart, but that online tools help authors do so, and it lists characteristics typical of predatory journals and their publishers: ^{45, 46}

• emails that aggressively solicit researchers ^{45, 46}
• a journal name that sounds somewhat familiar but is a devious permutation of a legitimate one ^{45, 46}
• an unprofessional website with poor graphics, misused language, dead links and aggressive advertising ^{45, 46}
• no street address or in-country telephone number, or fake ones ^{45, 46}
• no indexing in a recognised citation system such as PubMed or a legitimate directory such as the Directory of Open Access Journals ^{45, 46}
• promises of unrealistically quick peer review, or no information about the process ^{45, 46}
• article processing charges that are not transparent, very high or very low, or payable on submission rather than dependent on the outcome of review ^{45, 46}
• claims of broad coverage across multiple specialties or subspecialties ^{45, 46}
• a large stable of journals that have been started very recently or that contain few or no articles, are inaccessible or are of obviously poor quality ^{45, 46}
• an editorial board from outside the specialty or the country of publication, or unknown to someone experienced in publishing in the field ^{45, 46}
• an overly simple submission system that asks few questions and requests no information on conflicts of interest or authorship qualification ^{45, 46}

The medical writing agency that had submitted a client's paper to a predatory journal then reread the joint position statement. ²⁷ The statement's acknowledgement that fake journals are hard to distinguish from proper ones encouraged the agency, and the statement reassured it that its recommendation to withdraw the paper had been ethically right even though it was commercially risky. ²⁷ The statement's list of characteristics of predatory journals and their publishers helped with the standard operating procedure for verifying journals that the agency planned to introduce, particularly its points on the website's appearance, the financial policy, indexing in PubMed or the Directory of Open Access Journals, a publisher running a large number of journals covering any discipline, and the details of the editorial board. ²⁷ The agency included similar points in its checklist and added one of its own, publication history, because such journals have often published very few articles, as the one it had submitted to had. ²⁷ Its lessons were that predatory journals are a real risk met in daily work rather than a hypothetical one, that more stringent procedures are needed to avoid submitting to one unintentionally, and that predatory journals are true predators. ^{27, 47}

Nine warnings sum up what predators are up to: ⁴⁸

• claims of broad coverage, or a large stable of new, nearly empty journals ⁴⁸
• article-processing fees that are not transparent ⁴⁸
• an editorial board from outside the specialty or the country ⁴⁸
• a submission system that is overly simple, with few questions asked ⁴⁸
• promises of unrealistically quick review, or no information about the process ⁴⁸
• no indexing in PubMed or the Directory of Open Access Journals ⁴⁸
• no street address or in-country telephone number ⁴⁸
• a website that is off, with unprofessional graphics, English that appears written by a non-native speaker, many sections under construction, or signs of cloning or hacking ⁴⁸
• a familiar-sounding name and a familiar-looking logo, neither of them authentic ⁴⁸

One set of checks, by no means exhaustive or foolproof, asks these questions of a journal: ¹⁸

• Website. Is it legitimate and up to date? Are its name and URL unique, or near copies of an established journal's? Are there spelling errors? Does it read like a sales pitch to authors rather than addressing its readers? ⁴⁹
• Contact details. Are the editors listed with full email, telephone and postal details? Does the email domain match the journal's website, or is it a free address from a popular provider? Does an editor answer a pertinent question? Is the "European Journal of XYZ" actually based anywhere in Europe? ⁵⁰
• Editors. Can the credentials of the editor-in-chief and managing editor be verified, and do they match the journal's subject? Does the same editor run several unrelated journals from one publisher? Unlike language and copy editors, journal editors are usually specialists. Do the editors have publications of their own that can be found online? The point is not to discriminate against any scientist, but an experienced scientist is more likely to be qualified for an editorial or leadership role. Some listed editors may be fictitious, and some legitimate scientists may not know they are listed. ^{19, 20}
• Citation. Are there processes for tracking citations, allowing that a new journal may take at least a year or two to establish them? Does the journal cite a reputable impact metric such as Web of Science, Crossref or Altmetric? Does it explain how articles are processed and archived? ²⁰
• Copyright. Who keeps the rights, and is this stated in the author information? In open access the authors usually do. ⁵¹
• Peer review. Is it reasonably rigorous, as a legitimate journal imposing quality control would want? Is it remarkably quick, and is submission for review incredibly easy or "too good to be true"? How many reviewers are typically selected, and are any? Is the process transparent and described for authors? Can authors recommend reviewers, respond to comments and resubmit? Predatory journals may claim review and mimic the structure of legitimate journals while publishing all or most submissions without external review, and they often disregard the policies of WAME, COPE, the ICMJE and the Council of Science Editors on archiving, conflicts of interest, errata and transparency of processes and fees. ^{52, 19}

By watching for warning signs and asking themselves careful questions, authors can guard themselves against potential predators. ³⁴ The questions to ask are: ⁵³

• Did the invitation arrive as an obsequious-sounding email from the journal? ⁵³
• Is the submission fee very large or very small? Is it due on submission or at acceptance? Is it transparent on the site? ⁵³
• Is the journal indexed? Are its metrics legitimate? ⁵³
• Is the website's language awkward, with misspellings and poor grammar? ⁵³
• Is the journal very young? ⁵³
• How quick is peer review? ⁵³
• Does the publisher claim to publish many journals in varied fields? ⁵³
• Are any editorial board members prominent researchers in the field, or anyone the author recognises? ⁵³
• Does the editorial office address seem legitimate? ⁵³
• How does a sample article read? ⁵³
• Was the journal or publisher on Beall's list? Do any current web resources evaluate it? ⁵³

A further list of tips for identifying potential predatory publishers, journals and meetings, by no means exhaustive, cautions against putting too much weight on any single item, but a yes to the majority of them means an excellent chance of a true predator, to be avoided at all costs. ^{54, 55} For publishers and journals the signs are:

• unusually high or unusually low article processing charges ⁵⁴
• issue covers with obvious clip art and strange font choices ⁵⁴
• promises of extremely short peer review, often several days to a week, and of extremely short publication time, such as a month or less ⁵⁴
• few or no published issues online, and very few articles per issue ⁵⁴
• inconsistent timing between issues and numbers of issues per volume ⁵⁴
• impact factors from unfamiliar sources rather than Thomson Reuters or Scopus ⁵⁴
• large editorial boards, sometimes carrying famous names unlikely to be associated with an obscure journal and usually with photographs of poor quality obviously scavenged from the web, or an editorial board page "under construction" ⁵⁴

Signs of a predatory meeting

For meetings, a company running several meetings at the same venue on the same dates, or one that forces attendees to use its own preferred travel vendor, is often a first, obvious way to identify a predator. ²¹

The same list of tips gives signs for meetings and congresses: ⁵⁵

• strange or oddly broad subject categories ⁵⁵
• field trips and sightseeing tours running at the same time as the sessions, where at a legitimate meeting they usually run before or after hours or when no presentations are happening ⁵⁵
• a location either not stated or, in this list, possibly China, India, Pakistan or Africa, especially Nigeria ⁵⁵
• ad hoc extension of the abstract deadline ⁵⁵
• many logos of academic institutions and societies that are images rather than links ⁵⁵
• an abstract accepted overnight, which is evidence of no peer review ⁵⁵
• a poorly designed, garish website with scrolling text, glittery fonts, inconsistent formatting and poor alignment ⁵⁵
• a request for the lead author's short biography with the abstract or within the following 24 to 48 hours ⁵⁵
• no secure payment on the website, authors instead being sent bank details for a wire transfer ⁵⁵
• required use of a travel agency run by the same company ⁵⁵
• a US address, if one is given, in Delaware, whose incorporation rules set a low bar ⁵⁵
• no requirement as to who may attend, a registration fee being accepted from anyone ⁵⁵
• unusually high registration costs ⁵⁵
• many typos and much bad grammar ⁵⁵
• a registration fee charged to invited speakers ⁵⁵