TheWorld Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology orWASET is apredatory publisher ofopen accessacademic journals. The publisher has been listed as a "potential, possible, or probable"predatory publisher by American library scientistJeffrey Beall[1] and is listed as such by theMax Planck Society.[2] WASET's estimated annual revenue in 2017 alone was over $4 million,[3][4] with other estimates ranging from $8.9 million to $11.9 million for the years 2014 to 2019 combined.[5]
WASET has been accused of arrangingpredatory conferences, in order to artificially boost the academic credentials of presenters and paper submitters.[6][7] It claims to organize several thousands ofscientific conferences a year, using names that are the same or similar to real conferences organized by established scientific groups.[8][9] WASET also appears to operate the website "Conference Index", which claims to be a database of international conferences but only lists events from WASET.[10]
Legitimate conferences have publicly warned of identically named, fake WASET conferences.[11][12] In 2015, theUniversity of Toronto released a "scam advisory" about a purported conference on their premises advertised by WASET.[13][14] In 2018 WASET advertised 49,844 conferences, many of which share similar names.[15] Hundreds of conferences may be scheduled for the same location on the same day.[16][17] For example, 116 simultaneous scientific meetings were scheduled in a hotel in Rio de Janeiro in February 2016.[18][19]
The conferences are low-quality, described in one case as a "Potemkin village"[20] and anyone can present a paper by simply paying the registration fee.[21] Conferences are planned many years in advance.[19] The website includes a section on "Featured Locations" featuring photos of popular tourist destinations.[22] Names of researchers have been included as conference committee members, without their knowledge or consent.[18][23]
WASET is based in Turkey and is registered inAzerbaijan.[24] Its domain name was registered 2007 with a contact address inDubai.[25] It is run by Cemal Ardil, a former science teacher, with assistance from his daughter Ebru and his son Bora.[4] Cemal Ardil is also the person who has published the most articles on the WASET website.[26][27] Before taking on the name WASET, the organization was known under the name of "Enformatika".[26][27][28][29]
Journals are indexed in WASET's "International Science Index", not to be confused with theInstitute for Scientific Information (ISI) index, i.e. theWeb of Science.[16] WASET journals were indexed byScopus and listed in theSCImago Journal Rank from 2009 until 2011, when the coverage was cancelled.[30] They were furthermore included inQualis, 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 byFolha de S.Paulo, a Brazilian daily newspaper.[18]
In 2013 one of WASET's journals, theInternational Journal of Medical, Pharmaceutical, Biological, and Life Sciences, accepted an obviously fake article in asting operation byJohn Bohannon. The resulting article and data were published inScience.[31]
In mid-July 2018, a research team of journalists includingSüddeutsche Zeitung,ARD,ORF,BR,Falter andLe Monde published articles on unscientific and predatory publishers, including WASET andOMICS.[32][33][34] The group of journalists presented their findings at the 2018DEF CON 26 conference in a talk entitled "Inside the Fake Science Factory".[35][36][3] They detail how a WASET conference works, show how they gave a presentation on a ludicrous paper (generated usingSCIgen[37]) 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".[35]
^"Beware of fake conferences".26th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN). 2016-11-11.Archived from the original on 2017-07-04. Retrieved2017-07-04.
^"ICP12 2016 in Utrecht!".12th International Conference on Paleoceanography (ICP12). 2015.Archived from the original on 2016-09-14. Retrieved2017-07-04.
^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. Retrieved2022-02-12.
