Are proceedings of this conference really published by IEEE CS CPS?

Question

Today, I got the following e-mail from [email protected] :

Conference invitation to [my name]

Dear [my name]

This is Senlin Yan, the conference secretary of the 2018 International Conference on Sensor Networks and Signal Processing (SNSP 2018)(Oct. 28-31, 2018, Xi`an University of Science and Technology, Xi`an, China). We have got to know that you have published paper with title [one of my papers], it is quite inspiring and related to our conference topic, on behalf of SNSP 2018 organizing committee, I sincerely invite you to attend our conference.

1. Winners of the Best Oral Presentation in each session will be awarded a free registration to the next conference.
2. Active Reviewers are candidates for Technical Program Committee next year.
3. Attendees can enjoy a free tour of Terracotta Army in Xi`an.

If you are not available for attendance, could you please help us review one or two papers? It is highly appreciated if you kindly forward this conference information to your colleagues or friends in this field.

For more information, please visit http://www.snspconf.org

or contact [email protected]

Best Regards Senlin Yan

I have no intention attending this conference or reviewing one paper (I do not even work in Sensor Networks and Signal Processing), but I wanted to know if it was just some kind of spam or a real conference. Actually, the automated e-mail made me think it was some kind of academic spam asking for my bank data if I'd anwer, but it seems the conference exists (at least the website does). as they prentend its proceedings are published by IEEE CS CPS, I searched on the IEEE website and I did not find any reference to this conference.

So now my question is as follows :

• does IEEE really publish the proceedings of this conference which does not fit IEEE standard?

• Or is it a scam, and should I inform IEEE their name is used for dubious purpose?

Answer 1

The IEEE Computer Society Conference Publishing Service is a service available to conference organizers to help them publish conference proceedings, nothing more. The services they offer to conference organizers include: collecting copyright forms from authors, validating that submissions are in proper format, getting DOIs for the papers, and submitting bibliographic data to indexing services.

It doesn't mean that the conference is endorsed by the IEEE or IEEE Computer Society.

See their FAQ.

It does not mean that the conference is sponsored by IEEE an IEEE society (when you refer to an "IEEE conference", you probably mean one that is sponsored by an IEEE society):

CPS publishes proceedings of conferences that are not sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, IEEE, or any other IEEE society.

The eligibility criteria for non-sponsored conferences are listed here.

It does not mean that the proceedings will necessarily appear in the IEEE digital library:

CPS-published conference publications are submitted to IEEE Xplore and the IEEE Computer Society Digital Library (CSDL). All conferences and conference proceedings must meet IEEE's quality standards. IEEE reserves the right not to publish any proceedings that do not meet these standards.

Conferences that are technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society are listed on its website, in its conference calendar. This conference isn't, because it isn't sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. It doesn't need to be sponsored to use IEEE CS CPS as its publishing service.