World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology

WASET has been accused of arranging predatory conferences, in order to artificially boost the academic credentials of presenters and paper submitters.[6][7] It claims to organize several thousands of scientific conferences a year, using names that are the same or similar to real conferences organized by established scientific groups.[8][9] Legitimate conferences have publicly warned of identically named, fake WASET conferences.[10][11] In 2015, the University of Toronto released a "scam advisory" about a purported conference on their premises advertised by WASET.[12][13] In 2018 WASET advertised 49,844 conferences, many of which share similar names.[14] Hundreds of conferences may be scheduled for the same location on the same day.[15][16] For example, 116 simultaneous scientific meetings were scheduled in a hotel in Rio de Janeiro in February 2016.[17][18]

The conferences are low-quality, described in one case as a "Potemkin village"[19] and anyone can present a paper by simply paying the registration fee.[20] Conferences are planned many years in advance.[18] The website includes a section on "Featured Locations" featuring photos of popular tourist destinations.[21] Names of researchers have been included as conference committee members, without their knowledge or consent.[17][22]

WASET is based in Turkey and is registered in Azerbaijan.[23] Its domain name was registered 2007 with a contact address in Dubai.[24] It is run by Cemal Ardil, a former science teacher, with assistance from his daughter Ebru and his son Bora.[5] Cemal Ardil is also the person who has published the most articles on the WASET website.[25] Before taking on the name WASET, the organization was known under the name of "Enformatika".[26][25][27]

Journals are indexed in WASET's "International Science Index", not to be confused with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) index, i.e. the Web of Science.[15] WASET journals were indexed by Scopus and listed in the SCImago Journal Rank from 2009 until 2011, when the coverage was cancelled.[28] They were furthermore included in Qualis, an official Brazilian system for classifying scientific literature, which guides researchers in choosing journals for publication. This inclusion was called a "serious failure" by scientists interviewed by Folha de S.Paulo, a Brazilian daily newspaper.[17]

In 2013 one of WASET's journals, the International Journal of Medical, Pharmaceutical, Biological, and Life Sciences, accepted an obviously fake article in a sting operation by John Bohannon. The resulting article and data were published in Science.[29]

In mid-July 2018, a research team of journalists including Süddeutsche Zeitung, ARD, ORF, BR, Falter and Le Monde published articles on unscientific and predatory publishers, including WASET and OMICS.[30][31][32] The group of journalists presented their findings at the 2018 DEF CON 26 conference in a talk entitled "Inside the Fake Science Factory".[33][34][4] They detail how a WASET conference works, show how they gave a presentation on a ludicrous paper (generated using SCIgen[35]) to the gathered academics, and how they confronted the single person organizing the conference. The journalists state that their "findings highlight the prevalence of the pseudo-academic conferences, journals and publications and the damage they can and are doing to society".[33]

• Official website