I got snookered last year. In January I had someone create for me a list of Open Access conferences I might to to. [My consulting is focused 100% on working with organizations that want to accelerate the adoption of Open Access to scholarly journals.]
A great sounding conference showed up in the list and it was in NYC right near where my best friend lives. A one day conference assembling the world's experts in Open Access, Scholarly Communication, and Repository Management--right up my alley. I put it firmly on my schedule and turned down other possible travel or work for the day before, during and after that conference, --even made tentative arrangements with my friend. Then in March I went to register for the conference. It struck me as odd that the registration costs were in Euros. And then it was almost impossible to find the venue? And then I saw all the offers that my presentation would be published in a proceedings for a small fee. Then I looked up the sponsoring organization and discovered they had exactly the same conference scheduled in Boston the following week.
These conference sometimes do have a hotel room at which you will present. And dozens of conferences will be scheduled for that same hotel room. So you will present your paper on "Semantic Disintegrity Protection" must before the next speaker gets up and presents his paper on "Lifecycle of the Norwegian Bat." They all seem to be at attractive cities for visitors. Their attraction is someone whose daughter/son is graduating from a NY or Boston (or wherever) college and their department has some extra money of conference attendance, so they can then take this trip as a business trip and be compensated for all the expenses. It's a real racket.
I got snookered last year. In January I had someone create for me a list of Open Access conferences I might to to. [My consulting is focused 100% on working with organizations that want to accelerate the adoption of Open Access to scholarly journals.]
A great sounding conference showed up in the list and it was in NYC right near where my best friend lives. A one day conference assembling the world's experts in Open Access, Scholarly Communication, and Repository Management--right up my alley. I put it firmly on my schedule and turned down other possible travel or work for the day before, during and after that conference, --even made tentative arrangements with my friend. Then in March I went to register for the conference. It struck me as odd that the registration costs were in Euros. And then it was almost impossible to find the venue? And then I saw all the offers that my presentation would be published in a proceedings for a small fee. Then I looked up the sponsoring organization and discovered they had exactly the same conference scheduled in Boston the following week.
These conference sometimes do have a hotel room at which you will present. And dozens of conferences will be scheduled for that same hotel room. So you will present your paper on "Semantic Disintegrity Protection" must before the next speaker gets up and presents his paper on "Lifecycle of the Norwegian Bat." They all seem to be at attractive cities for visitors. Their attraction is someone whose daughter/son is graduating from a NY or Boston (or wherever) college and their department has some extra money of conference attendance, so they can then take this trip as a business trip and be compensated for all the expenses. It's a real racket.