False advertising

By Emily Margosian, assistant editor

The ongoing criminal investigation of a disgraced Silicon Valley CEO, a false German heiress who infiltrated New York high society, and a coalition of Hollywood elite attempting to bribe their children’s way into higher education — 2019 was a year seemingly defined by fraud. Aptly dubbed “the year of the scam” by various media outlets, public fascination with high-profile grift has since spawned a small media empire of podcasts, novels, streaming pilots, and for lucky Fyre Fest fans — the choice of two competing documentaries.

Medicine has also increasingly grappled with its own growing economy of fraud. Predatory publishers and conferences have continued to proliferate within academia’s “publish or perish” pressure cooker, aided by changes in scholarly publishing models and advances in e-phishing. Scammers have also recently turned their attention toward legitimate professional meetings, in the form of carefully crafted webpages and near-identical URLs intended to trick attendees out of registration fees and housing deposits.

This month, Dermatology World explores these growing areas of fraud within medicine, and how dermatologists can avoid becoming victims.

Meeting fraud

According to Tim Moses, CMP, AAD senior director of meetings and conventions, one of the biggest issues currently facing the meetings industry is the presence of fake pop-up companies that appear during online registration periods for well-known conferences. Many of these companies deceive physicians by setting up misleading web domain names that reference or very closely match the legitimate organization or event, sometimes only distinguishable by an out-of-place hyphen or semicolon. A 2013 New York Times story reported a scenario where researchers were fooled into attending a predatory conference called “Entomology-2013” only to later learn that the legitimate conference was “Entomology 2013.”

“These rogue companies are misrepresenting themselves as either the AAD or official vendors of the AAD, providing meeting registration and housing on behalf of the Academy,” said Moses. “They then basically collect registration fees and housing deposits on ‘our’ behalf and simply retain the money, misleading our attendees into thinking that they are registered or have confirmed housing for the meeting. In addition, these companies also tend to charge much higher fees, especially for housing where they typically collect the deposit for the attendees’ entire stay.”

Legal action is often difficult to pursue beyond a cease-and-desist, as many of the companies setting up false websites are located overseas, explained Moses. “This is a growing issue that is occurring with many associations throughout the country, and it is extremely difficult to track down these illegitimate companies and enforce any legal action because most of them are located outside of the United States.”

Dermatologists can verify the legitimacy of AAD/A events by ensuring that any registration or housing arrangements are made through either aad.org or Experient, the AAD’s only official registration and housing provider. For examples of legitimate URLs for either site, visit: staging.aad.org/dw/monthly/2019/october/asked-and-answered-academy-legitimate.

Moses also advises that AAD members and exhibitors do not ever send cash, check, or wire transfer to pay for meeting expenses, “but only to put charges on credit card, where there is a better chance of disputing any irregularities or bogus charges.”

Predatory conferences

While dermatologists should be careful during the registration process for conferences with which they are familiar, they should also be aware of a growing trend of predatory, or “fake” conferences. Antonella Tosti, MD, professor of dermatology and cutaneous surgery at the University of Miami, said she receives “at least two to three invites per week,” after first noticing solicitations for fake conferences in her email inbox around five years ago.

While attending medical conferences can be an important part of any physician’s career, young physicians and medical students are often most at risk. “Younger doctors may not be as familiar and are easily attracted, but these types of scams are not specific to any particular branch of medicine, and will try to attract all possible physicians,” said Dr. Tosti.

Invitations to these events typically take the form of flattering, unsolicited emails that include a non-specific title or greeting (e.g., “Dear Researcher/Scholar”). The meetings themselves often cover a broad scope of topics in order to rope in as many attendees as possible — which can occasionally lead to amusing results. Dr. Tosti shared that she was once invited to present a paper she had authored on how to identify predatory publishers — at a fake conference. Often predatory conferences will list highly regarded keynote speakers and committee members who have no idea that they’ve been linked to the event, as described by a 2016 New York Times investigation into fake academia: “When I contacted those identified as committee members and speakers, many immediately replied that they had no idea they were on the website and had no affiliation...Within 24 hours of my inquiries, someone removed their names and biographies from the site and replaced them with a page that said ‘Keynote Speakers to be Announced!’”

Some of the most common signs of a predatory conference include huge registration fees, offers to present work with seemingly no vetting, and organizers who give conflicting information or are difficult to reach. For more indicators of predatory conferences, see sidebar.

False publishers

Since 2002, scientific publishing has undergone an open access “revolution;” a new model that has since been praised for improving public access to scientific research by shifting the responsibility of payment from reader to author. Unfortunately, however, “While this change in scientific publishing has paved the way for more rapid dissemination of data, it has resulted in the emergence of exploitative groups known as ‘predatory,’ open access publishers” (J Am Acad Dermatol. 2016;75: 658-659).

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Similar to the open access publishing model, authors who are approached by predatory publications are often charged a fee to publish their articles. However, these publications fail to offer “the level of peer review, copy editing, typesetting, layout, distribution, long-term archiving, and indexing that are associated with peer-reviewed content that meets conventional scholarly publishing standards,” writes the Council of Science Editors. Like their conference counterparts, predatory journals are also known for attempting to mimic well-known, legitimate names in publishing by either assuming a name close to that of an established publication, or by including logos from reputable organizations when emailing calls for papers. Although there are some exceptions, most predatory journals are internationally based, making legal action against them difficult.

While researchers in developing countries are most often the victims of predatory journals, young physicians should also be on their guard. “Typically, these journals target early-career researchers and medical students, but no one is immune,” said Brett Sloan, MD, editor of JAAD Case Reports, an open access journal. “Anyone who has recently published in the last three years has received phishing emails from predatory journals asking them to submit or be on their editorial board.”

Although Dr. Sloan believes the main reason predatory journals have proliferated so extensively in recent years is due to the “immense pressure on researchers and other academics to publish,” he also acknowledges that the open access movement has offered scammers a convenient platform to copy. “Open access publishing offers huge benefits for both authors and readers, and there are now hundreds of open access journals being set up by reputable publishers,” he explained. “However, this rise in popularity has also opened the door to less respectable journals that are now abusing the author-pay model and risking the integrity of published research.”

How is the open-access revolution changing the landscape of peer-reviewed dermatologic literature?

According to watchdog groups, the problem has continued to grow. Starting in 2011, Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, maintained a list of “potential, possible, or probable” list of predatory journals and publishers (often known as “Beall’s List”). By 2017, the list included 1,115 publishers and 1,294 journals, and was picked up later that year by Cabell’s International, a scholarly analytics company, which now maintains an active blacklist of over 8,000 journals.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also taken action on the issue in recent years, issuing its own set of guidelines on identifying predatory publishers (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not-od-18-011.html). Likewise, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has since begun monitoring ongoing publisher compliance with guidelines from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. “If a publisher is found to not be following established industry best practices, NLM will cease collecting the publisher’s journals and not accept applications for any of the NLM literature databases, including PubMed Central and MEDLINE, for a minimum of three years,” said Joyce E.B. Backus, MSLIS, associate director for library operations at the NLM in a 2018 article in Eyenet Magazine.

What does the future hold in the fight against predatory publishing? A 2016 New York Times report opines that without a correction of academia’s supply and demand problem, bad actors will continue to flourish. “There are real, prestigious journals and conferences in higher education that enforce and defend the highest standards of scholarship. But there are also many more PhD-holders than there is space in those publications,” the article writes. “So it’s not surprising that some academics have chosen to give one another permission to accumulate publication credits on their C.V.s...nor is it surprising that some canny operators have now realized that when standards are loose to begin with, there are healthy profits to be made in the gray areas of academe.”