In our field, the HICSS conference is rather well known, not least for its choice location (Hawaii) at a time of year (January) when most US folks want a break from the weather. I’m not a huge fan of the work there but some folks try to convince me it’s the real deal (usually the folks who go!). The acronym HICSS stands for Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. So successful is this conference that another has emerged, totally unrelated, also in Hawaii and also going by the acronym HICSS. Only this time, the SS stands for Social Sciences. Their call for papers is suitably all-embracing so that most disciplines could find a home here (and they organize island tours too!). It is not clear that any papers are reviewed which you think might put some providers of funding off the event but the conference certainly gets attendees.
The idea of two almost identically named conferences existing in the same location might be a coincidence but I don’t imagine so. The newer version makes little effort to disambiguate itself from the original and an email to the organizers just brought a curt reply that they were not in any way related to the original HICCS. They certainly don’t mention who the organizers or the reviewers might be either. Suspicious yet?
The emergence of bogus conferences has been documented in New Scientist and shows no signs of letting up. I heard colleagues mention it at the Council of Scientific Society Presidents’ meeting as a growing challenge in some fields. The most blatant efforts actually run shadow conferences at the same time or a week adjacent to the target conference, with a similar name, and lure people into believing it is a legitimate venue, charging them handsomely for attendance. Since many associations and hotels rely on the profit from conferences, you can see the challenge. You’d think scholars would not fall for it but then, how many folks opened that email call from the ‘other’ HICSS and thought a trip to Hawaii might be nice?
It’s not just conferences. I get an email every other day from some dubious publisher inviting my paper submissions. Follow the trail and you’ll find an editorial board of nobodies from far-flung universities that may or may not exist and then the real kicker, the page fees that you will be liable for when your paper is accepted (and it will be accepted). Open source publishing efforts have a real battle on their hands to demonstrate legitimacy and the frightening prospect of both the cowboy publishers and the traditional, conservative corporate publishers benefiting from this muddying of the waters is very real. Here’s another challenge for information science.