SciSPAM spam Spam SPAM

Spam aimed at scientists (let's call it SciSpam) was quite unexpected when it began to trickle in about five years ago. In among all the offers to significantly enhance parts of my body, desperate requests for help from fallen royals or terrified lawyers trying to discreetly extract large sums of money from foreign dictatorships, solicitations from exotic women who seductively suggest they are my soul mate, and bargain pharmaceuticals, there are also:

• Invitations to present keynote papers or chair sessions at international conferences not even remotely related to my field.
• CVs from potential post docs and graduate students whose experience has nothing to do with what happens in my lab. My grad students even get these emails, honouring them with preliminary doctorates.
• Invitations to serve on the editorial boards of journals, usually not in my field. In a tired moment a few years ago, while infatuated with the concept of Open Access and before I was becoming immune to such things, I agreed to one such invitation. I was bemused to get a follow up message asking for my cv and and short description of my work. The so-called editor had no idea who I was or what I did.
• Invitations to submit articles papers to journals not in my field, or newly formed, predatory journals anxious to charge exorbitant Open Access fees that aren't disclosed until it is too late.

At first glance, it is surprising that SciSpam should be successful enough to keep going. After all, we are supposed to be intellectuals, critical thinkers who evaluate every variable before making a decision. But there is also a lot of money floating around in science, and where there is money, there are sharks circling trying to rip off chunks. Scientists in the early years of their careers are vulnerable because they need to get out and network, have papers published, get onto editorial boards, to build their reputations. Financial deceptions aside, much of this scispam activity is relatively harmless. People know how to harvest emails addresses, and it is then just as easy to send an email to a thousand potential supervisors, speakers or suckers, as it is to send the message to one. Maybe they'll get lucky.

The scenarios hiding behind some of these messages reminds me of some of my own past fantasies. After I had been in science long enough to experience feelings of distaste, disappointment and animosity towards some colleagues, I developed fictional conference organization plans of my own. I would find the most expensive hotel in the most difficult and expensive country in the world to get to, and anonymously invite these colleagues on an all expense paid trip to the conference of their dreams. They would arrive and find no conference and be stuck with the bills, wondering who had invited them. Although This might have succeeded back then, it would not work now. No one would believe it, or they would delete it without reading. My invitation would be just one more drop in an ocean of SciSpam.