If you work in the academy, you are surely already getting a lot of spam from fake conferences asking for papers, PC participation etc. You also know that several years ago, a new form of harassment appeared: fake academic journals. There seems to be more and more of those everyday.

Sometimes, they're a bit hard to spot, especially if their focus seems to be in accordance with your activities. A hint is that you've never heard of them before, though. And sometimes, they're not hard to spot... at all. Meet the stupidest fake academic journal ever: the Journal of Bioinformatics and Biological Engineering.

Here's what I recieved yesterday:

We recently noticed your outstanding paper “Lisp: Report on the 5th workshop ELW at ECOOP 2008” and it well suits the focus and scope of Journal of Bioinformatics and Biological Engineering(JBBE). Considering that we share the same interests in Bioinformatics and Biological Engineering, we are now sending this message to you and sincerely invite you to share your new research or updated results in JBBE.

So, here are a couple of remarks:

  1. It's cool that you have noticed this paper "recently", although it's almost 6 years old now.
  2. The paper in question is actually not a paper. It's a conference proceedings for which I was programme chair, so basically, I wrote only the cover in it.
  3. Finally, there is nothing related to Biology in there. It's about a dynamic programming language.

Well done, guys. You almost got me! Ah, one more thing: I do have some interest in Computer Science and Biology, and I even wrote two papers in this area. Apparently, you failed to spot them, though...

Here's the end of the message:

Please kindly forward this email to your colleagues and students. We shall be greatly appreciated to hear from you at any time.

No, I won't forward this email to my colleagues. And no, you shan't be "greatly appreciated" to hear from me at any time!