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Comment by ngkabra | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure I understand what you're saying.

I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement. However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an achievement.

Hence, this expose to improve awareness.

I am not sure how I have poorly represented the academic system and myself by doing that, so could you elaborate?

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What astrowizicist is trying to say is that any student - let alone faculty - who is falling for a spamference is clearly too stupid to work in academia.

I think the real point of this article is that it's not realistic to expect every one of these students to have two high-quality published papers as a graduation requirement. This leads to and fuels the bogus conferences.

I may elaborate, in the hope it is useful.

You should never submit any work to a conference or journal you do not know and follow beforehand.

To be more explicit: a good rule of thumb is that if you are not familiar with the publications of at least some of the committee or, if you were asked to suggest reviewers for you research out of the scientific committee members, you'd be hard pressed to name a few, you should not submit anything.

Your students should know that. If none explained something similar to the above, then you should have.

As you get older, I find I only follow 1-2 quality publications. I often get invited to dubious / shady conferences and I just hit the spam button. All of my peers do the same.

Why shouldn't you submit to such a conference? Because you don't know if it's legit or not?

I don't think the students care if it's legit or not. They care about getting papers published so they can graduate. And apparently their schools don't care if the conferences are legit or not either. So everyone is happy, we all win!

the only actual beneficiary i can think of is the people charging students to publish without even having to deal with the overhead of hiring someone to read the damn thing

I was being somewhat sarcastic, but I'd suggest that students and professors get some self-interested benefit from the system, or it wouldn't have come to exist.

The schools get to make it look like they are producing high-quality students with publications, without the professors actually having to do much work to make this true.

The students get to graduate, and get a publication credit, regardless of the quality of their work, so long as they can pay.

heh i know u were. i get what youre saying here but my issue with that is it just leads to like watered-down pseudo-journals of questionable reputation.

it almost feels like a better alternative would be for the students to run their own informal conferences & publish through an open publishing network (a lot of these are emerging in academia to subvert all the licensing BS from the journals)

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