The plague arrives in Vienna.
Here’s a conference organizer I think everyone should avoid: SGEM. They don’t explain what their acronym means, and they are not transparent about other things as well. SGEM copies logos from legitimate organizations to make their conferences look legitimate and to lure people into registering for them.
The conference organizers appear to be based in Bulgaria and associated with someone named Dr. George Siarov. According to his profile on the company’s website, he is a “Scientist with two PhD researches [sic] in mining and geoinformatics.”
Certified bogus.
Most of the information on the colorful conference websites panders to potential registrants, displaying — for example — a bogus badge that says, “Academic Conference Excellence Certified Event.” No information is given regarding what organization certified the event, but most probably, no such certification ever occurred: the badge is a complete lie.
False and incompetent.
This for-profit conference organizer is not shy about lifting and using the logos from respected companies in the scholarly publishing industry, as shown in the image above. Rather stupidly, their website states, “This will rise up [sic] your impact factor.” Impact factors are earned by journals, not researchers.
It appears the firm’s next conference will be held in Vienna, Austria in November. When I visit the conference website, music plays on my computer. The registration fee for “delegates” is €360, plus, being Europe, 20% tax.
There is a plague of bogus conferences in East Asia right now. Sadly, they appear to be increasing in Europe as well, with SGEM as evidence of this. I recommend that researchers avoid for-profit conference organizers such as SGEM and seek out conferences from respected scholarly societies.
Appendix: All the 2016 SGEM conferences that I could find:
- SGEM Conferences on Earth and Geo Sciences
- SGEM Extended Scientific Green Sessions in Vienna, Austria
- SGEM Conferences on Social Sciences and Arts
- SGEM Extended Scientific Art Sessions in Vienna, Austria
