The age of Open Access in scholarly publishing has led to a rise in predatory conferences and fake journals taking advantage of authors seeking outlets for publishing. Many journal societies and institutions have tried to fight back against these predatory publishers. A new initiative Think. Check. Attend. helps researchers to identify potential predatory conferences in order to avoid potential scams. Yet scammers have continued to find new ways to defraud aspiring researchers. Their latest venture: fake acceptance letters.
Within the last 5 years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) reported that at least seven potential authors have contacted the journal society to thank the editors for accepting their manuscript. The problem? No journal in ASCE accepted these authors’ manuscripts for publication. In fact, the papers were not even submitted to a real ASCE journal. Angela Cochran of the Scholarly Kitchen investigated these scams and found that these fake acceptance letters looked legitimate with an ASCE letterhead, logos for DOAJ, Crossref, and other various indices, and an editor’s signature. However, the signature was fake (although the editor’s name was real) and no journal title was given. In addition, the letter mentioned Open Access even though ASCE doesn’t have an Open Access journal. Three of the letters followed this format while another was sent as e-mail correspondence from a person claiming to be a “friend” of an ASCE editor. This “friend” communicated with the author via e-mail and collected both submission and publication fees from the author, neither of which ASCE requests.
While seven fake acceptance letters from just one publishing society doesn’t seem like a major issue, it’s possible that other authors have had similar scams pulled on them but do not want to admit to it either out of embarrassment or fear. In order to counteract this fraud, Angela Cochran suggests some changes that should be made to submission guidelines to help authors avoid these scams. Some potential signs of fraudulent decision letters include: the editor providing a guaranteed publication date (most journals do not provide this); editor names that are misspelled; no journal title being provided in the letter; and requests for additional publication fees.
