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I'm a very early stage researcher and my first two conference papers could have been better, but that doesn't stop new journals spamming me with offers to publish my work. This morning I received two emails from:

  1. Journal of Communication and Computer (http://www.davidpublishing.com/)
  2. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science (http://ijpg.org/index.php/IJACSci)

Now this is clearly spam, they know nothing about my research area or they wouldn't be asking me, and my first reaction is to not waste my time reformatting work that I've already done. But am I missing something here?

Personally I feel that publishing in these general purpose repositories dilutes the (our!) publishing model and makes it harder to find related research.

So what is, if anything, being done about this?

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    I agree with you that there is a serious problem with these spam "journals", but I think this question would need some refocusing to be productive here (right now, it is very much discussion/complaint oriented). Incidentally, the offer is presumably to publish a longer journal version of your conference paper. That does have some value and is fairly standard in computer science, although these would be terrible places to publish the journal version.
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 13:49
  • Yeah I was struggling to make this into a question rather than a rant. I'm genuinely interested to know if there is something we, as a community, are doing about this though.
    – Matthew Orlinski
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 13:51
  • Related: academia.stackexchange.com/q/2055/102 (duplicate?)
    – user102
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 13:53
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    Are you familiar with Beall's list (scholarlyoa.com/publishers)? He is an academic librarian who compiles a list of predatory publishers. Of course there's always a little debate about how to place the publishers near the borderline, but I see this list as a really valuable service. Sadly, there are so many of these publishers that nobody could make a truly complete list.
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 13:55
  • Wowzors. That is a long list. Thanks. I'll add the ones that I've been contacted by to the list.
    – Matthew Orlinski
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 13:58

2 Answers 2

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So what is, if anything, being done about this?

Ignore them.

No, you are not missing anything. These journals are scams, not serious scientific literature.

If you plan to publish a longer version of your conference paper, send it to one of the journals that your paper cites, or at least to a journal where you recognize a significant fraction of the editorial board.

Sadly, trying to "doing something about" these scammers is as futile as "doing something about" fake email quota warnings, diploma mills, exiled Nigerian princes, international email lotteries, and three-card monte. Set up your mail program to blacklist their emails if you can, but then move on with your life.

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If you don't regard these journals as worth publishing in, then chances are no-one else will either. If you think you have unpublished work that people would be interested in reading, but isn't worth submitting for whatever reason, arXiv seems a good place to put it. There are lots of conference proceedings on there.

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