The World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology or WASET is a
predatory publisher of
open accessacademic journals. The publisher has been listed as a "potential, possible, or probable"
predatory publisher by American library scientist
Jeffrey Beall[1] and is listed as such by the
Max Planck Society[2] and Stop Predatory Journals.[3] WASET's estimated annual revenue in 2017 alone was over $4 million,[4][5] with other estimates ranging from $8.9 million to $11.9 million for the years 2014 to 2019 combined.[6]
Conferences
WASET has been accused of arranging
predatory conferences, in order to artificially boost the academic credentials of presenters and paper submitters.[7][8] It claims to organize several thousands of
scientific conferences a year, using names that are the same or similar to real conferences organized by established scientific groups.[9][10] WASET also appears to operate the website "Conference Index", which claims to be a database of international conferences but only lists events from WASET.[11]
Legitimate conferences have publicly warned of identically named, fake WASET conferences.[12][13] In 2015, the
University of Toronto released a "scam advisory" about a purported conference on their premises advertised by WASET.[14][15] In 2018 WASET advertised 49,844 conferences, many of which share similar names.[16] Hundreds of conferences may be scheduled for the same location on the same day.[17][18] For example, 116 simultaneous scientific meetings were scheduled in a hotel in Rio de Janeiro in February 2016.[19][20]
The conferences are low-quality, described in one case as a "
Potemkin village"[21] and anyone can present a paper by simply paying the registration fee.[22] Conferences are planned many years in advance.[20] The website includes a section on "Featured Locations" featuring photos of popular tourist destinations.[23] Names of researchers have been included as conference committee members, without their knowledge or consent.[19][24]
Organization
WASET is based in Turkey and is registered in
Azerbaijan.[25] Its domain name was registered 2007 with a contact address in
Dubai.[26] It is run by Cemal Ardil, a former science teacher, with assistance from his daughter Ebru and his son Bora.[5] Cemal Ardil is also the person who has published the most articles on the WASET website.[27][28] Before taking on the name WASET, the organization was known under the name of "Enformatika".[27][28][29][30]
Journal indexing
Journals are indexed in WASET's "International Science Index", not to be confused with the
Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) index, i.e. the
Web of Science.[17] WASET journals were indexed by
Scopus and listed in the
SCImago Journal Rank from 2009 until 2011, when the coverage was cancelled.[31] They were furthermore included in
Qualis, an official Brazilian system for classifying scientific literature, which guides researchers in choosing journals for publication. This inclusion was called a "serious failure" by scientists interviewed by
Folha de S.Paulo, a Brazilian daily newspaper.[19]
Media attention
In 2013 one of WASET's journals, the International Journal of Medical, Pharmaceutical, Biological, and Life Sciences, accepted an obviously fake article in a
sting operation by
John Bohannon. The resulting article and data were published in
Science.[32]
In mid-July 2018, a research team of journalists including
Süddeutsche Zeitung,
ARD,
ORF,
BR,
Falter and
Le Monde published articles on unscientific and predatory publishers, including WASET and
OMICS.[33][34][35] The group of journalists presented their findings at the 2018
DEF CON 26 conference in a talk entitled "Inside the Fake Science Factory".[36][37][4] They detail how a WASET conference works, show how they gave a presentation on a ludicrous paper (generated using
SCIgen[38]) to the gathered academics, and how they confronted the single person organizing the conference. The journalists state that their "findings highlight the prevalence of the pseudo-academic conferences, journals and publications and the damage they can and are doing to society".[36]
^"Beware of fake conferences". 26th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN). 2016-11-11.
Archived from the original on 2017-07-04. Retrieved 2017-07-04.
^"ICP12 2016 in Utrecht!". 12th International Conference on Paleoceanography (ICP12). 2015.
Archived from the original on 2016-09-14. Retrieved 2017-07-04.
^
abWeber-Wulff, Debora (2012-06-17).
"Turkish mock conferences". Copy, Shake, and Paste: A blog about plagiarism and scientific misconduct.
Archived from the original on 2022-02-12. Retrieved 2022-02-12.