Tag: SPAM

Starting to like Academia.Edu, except for annoying emails re: who is searching for me

Well, I am continuing to play around with Academia.Edu. I created a profile there for myself and am also building one for my father Howard Eisen as part of my campaign to “Free my father’s publications.” Academia.Edu has some nice features. I think I still like Mendeley more, but am reserving judgement.

That being said, the default setting at Academia.Edu for email updates is really annoying — I keep getting messages like

Hi Jonathan,

Someone just searched for you on Google, and found your page on Academia.edu.

To see the search query they used, what rank you are on Google for this query, and what country the search came from, follow the link below

Link removed by me

Thanks,

The Academia.edu team

Tip:

To ensure that your Academia.edu page appears high up on Google, link to it from the website of your department, college, university or blog. 88% of people on Academia.edu who link to their page like this appear #1 on Google for searches for their name + university, e.g. ‘Richard Price Oxford’.

First of all, getting emails like this should be Opt In not Opt Out. Second, I find this to be a bit too earnest an attempt to manipulate google rankings to help out Academia.Edu. (I note, while creating this post, I did a search for myself and Academia.Edu and got the links above and then I got an email again, telling me someone searched for me. I know. It was me. I mean, I guess link trading is a real thing, but telling me to add a link do that my Academia.Edu profile might move up in searches is I guess annoying to me.

Anyway – still playing with Academia.Edu. Still liking much of it. But if you search for me on the web and go to Academia.Edu I am sorry but I will not know as I will be disabling email messages from them.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Science SPAMMER of the month: OMICS publishing group

Well, Science SPAM never seems to go away. Not sure exactly why it seems to come in waves, but recently I have been getting a lot of email messages from the OMICS publishing group OMICS Publishing Group: An Open Access Publisher

The latest is for the Journal of Bioanalysis & Biomedicine. I love how the message says

“This is not a spam message, and has been sent to you because of your eminence in the field. “

Interestingly, this is the EXACT same wording in messages I used to receive from the horrible Bentham OPEN group. (see one of my complaining posts about this here). I wonder, did Bentham somehow morph into OMICS publishing group? OMICS Publishing group is also trying to promote itself as an Open Access publisher in much the same way Bentham does. I hope for everyone’s sake they are not connected since the last thing we need is more SPAM out there. Anyway, since I have gotten a bunch of emails from various OMICS journals many of which I have no possible scientific connection to, I am giving OMICS my “Science SPAMMER of the month award”.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Anyone else getting lots of China-Conference SPAM recently?

Anyone else out there getting a ridiculous amount of conference SPAM recently relating to conferences in China? I keep getting invited to speak at or chair sessions at various meetings of little relevance to what I do. For example, consider a recent email I got that starts with

Dear Dr. Jonathan A. Eisen,
You are cordially invited, on behalf of the organizing commission, to Chair a Session or give a Keynote Speech at Session 9-3: Protein Biomaterial Design and Applications of BIT’s 4th Annual Protein and Peptide Conference (PepCon-2011). The theme of this upcoming conference is “New Leaders in Protein and Peptide Science”. The conference will be held at China National Convention Center, Beijing, China from March 23-25, 2011.

This is relating to this meeting: BIT Life Sciences’ 4th Annual PepCon-2011 which has little relevance to what I do. I have been getting many many emails like this over the last few weeks. Not sure what led to the uptick in getting these emails but they are starting to annoy me …

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Gmail account deletion phishing attempt …

Just got this in my inbox – have never received any phishing directed at my gmail account before – maybe this is a follow up to google’s issues with China?

Gmail Alert
reply-to
infotechcrewacess@gmail.com

to

date
Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 12:34 PM
subject
Verify Your Gmail

hide details 12:34 PM (5 minutes ago)

We are shutting down some email accounts and your account was automatically chosen to be deleted. If you are still interested in using our email service please fill in the space below for verification purpose by clicking the reply button and fill the form below. Learn more

Account: Password: Birth date: Country:

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.Thank you for using Gmail !

The Gmail Team
G MAI L BETA

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Ooh – my first Epernicus spam

Just got this via Epernicus –  is it a sign that Epernicus is attracted more attention? (For those who do not know, Epernicus is a professional networking system for scientists)

Nice To Meet You,
How are you today ?,My name is (deleted) Hight,fair in completion ,i saw your profile today on (www.epernicus.com) and after going true it i was moved with the quality i found in
your profile,which makes me to became interested in knowing you the more. but i will like you to no that distance ,age or color dose not matter but what maters is love and understanding and being honest to each other. i will like you contact me true my direct mailing address so that i will give you my picture and tell you more about me. (email deleted)i have SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT to tell you.Good to hear from you,
(email deleted)
Yours dream love. And Happy New Year,
(deleted)

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

For $&%# sake, Bentham Open Journals, leave me alone

For crying out loud, I am still getting crappy spammy mail from various “Bentham Open” journals. The most annoying part to me of Bentham Open is that they try to make it seem that anything published in an Open Access journal is better than anything published in a non Open Access journal. While I personally believe publishing in an OA manner is great, lying about the benefits of OA is not a good thing.

For example they ask and answer the following question “WHY PUBLISH IN OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS? ” Their answers include:

  • Your article will obtain more citations.
  • Your article will be peer-reviewed and published very fast.
  • Your article can be read by potentially millions of readers, which is incomparable to publishing in a traditional subscription journal.
  • All published open access articles will receive massive international exposure and as is usually the case for open access publications, articles will also receive high citations.

Yes, that is right, the crappiest, most boring, most idiotic article in an OA journal will receive “massive international exposure” and “high citations.”

I know, criticism of Bentham Open may seem biased coming from me, a PLoS insider. So, just in case you were not aware that just about everyone else out there cannot stand them, here are some reading assignments:

And so on.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Really sick of Bentham Open Spam

Once again, I am getting sick of getting email after email from various Bentham Open Journals like the one below.  This is basically a form of SPAM as they send these out to people no matter what the connection is to the journals field.  I like how they now emphasize that “Please note that submission of a manuscript is not a guarantee for acceptance for publication”

This likely has something to do with the recent controversy over a Bentham Open journal accepting a nonsense paper .
Just goes to show you that just as their are annoying commercial journals and annoying society journals, there certainly are annoying open access journals.  And many Bentham journals take the prize for being as annoying as they come.  Perhaps not all Bentham journals are like this, but I get spam-like email from dozens of them … and do not get any from other Open Access journals.

Dr. J.A. Eisen
Institute for Genomic Research Rockville MD 20850
United States

Dear Dr. Eisen,
I am writing to you in my capacity as the Editor-in-Chief of Current Molecular Pharmacology, which is a cutting-edge peer-reviewed journal published by Bentham Science Publishers. Bentham Science publishes more than 300 print and open access journals.
Current Molecular Pharmacology is in its second volume and is indexed by all major indexing media includingChemical Abstracts, EMBASE, Genamics JournalSeek, Scopus, etc. The journal’s homepage may be viewed athttp://www.currmolpharm.org
The journal invites contributions for both comprehensive review articles and guest edited issues in all areas of cellular and molecular pharmacology with a major emphasis on the mechanism of action of novel drugs under development, innovative pharmacological technologies, cell signaling, transduction pathway analysis, genomics, proteomics, and metabonomics applications to drug action.
It is a great pleasure to invite you to contribute to Current Molecular Pharmacology. If you wish to submit your work to the journal, then please provide us the title and an abstract (up to 250 words) of your article by email toeditorial@currmolpharm.org You may submit the full article.
Please note that submission of a manuscript is not a guarantee for acceptance for publication, as all manuscripts will be subjected to peer review. Each prospective first-named (corresponding) author will receive a limited number of free reprints and PDF of the paper.
Please could you also refer the journal to your colleagues and other contacts in the field, including your librarian, for promotional purposes. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Nouri Neamati,
Editor-in-Chief CMP

Here are some comments from FriendFeed
http://friendfeed.com/treeoflife/d8716752/really-sick-of-bentham-open-spam?embed=1

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Do not fall for SPAM pretending to be from Elsevier

Just got the email below (with some key parts blotted out). It is clearly (to me) fake (although it is kind of funny in a way given the recent news about Elsevier publishing fake journals). But just in case someone else out there got the same SPAM and did not figure out it was fake, I am posting this message here.

ELSEVIER:
BUILDING INSIGHTS; BREAKING BOUNDARIES
MANUSCRIPTS SUBMISSION

Dear Colleague,

On behalf of all the Editors-in-chief of Elsevier Journals, we wish to Communicate to you that we are currently accepting manuscripts in all Fields of human Endeavour.
All articles published will be peer-reviewed. The following types of papers are considered for publication:

• Original articles in basic and applied research.
•Critical reviews, surveys, opinions, commentaries and essays.

Authors are invited to submit manuscripts reporting recent developments in their fields. Papers submitted will be sorted out and published in any of our numerous journals that best Fits. This is a special publication procedure which published works will be discussed at seminars (organized by Elsevier) at strategic Cities all over the world. Please maximize this opportunity to showcase your research work to the world.

The submitted papers must be written in English and describe original research not published nor currently under review by other journals. Parallel submissions will not be accepted.

Our goal is to inform authors about their paper(s) within one week of receipt. All submitted papers, if relevant to the theme and objectives of the journal, will go through an external peer-review process.

Prospective authors should send their manuscript(s) in Microsoft Word or PDF format to XXXXX and should Include a cover sheet containing corresponding Author(s) name, Paper Title, affiliation, phone, fax number, email address etc.

Kind Regards,

XXXXXXXXX

PS: Pls. show interest by mailing XXXXXX if your Manuscript is not ready but will be ready soon.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Biotechnology SPAM getting worse and worse

I simply cannot hold off any longer. I posted on Biotech. SPAM and backed off after getting some really really hostile email and comments. But here we go again.

In the last few months I have gotten so much biotech SPAM and last week I did something that added to the deluge. I got my email from where I used to work (The Institute for Genomic Research, also known as TIGR) forwarded to my current account. I still am doing projects with TIGR (well, TIGR technically does not exist anymore – it is now part of the J. Craig Venter Institute also known as the JVCI) so they have been kind enough to let me keep getting my email from there at least until my projects with them are over.

The problem with this is that many biotech. companies latch onto email addresses associated with TIGR/JCVI like, well, leeches. And they never seem to let go. And if you combine my TIGR, gmail, and Davis accounts, I get a lot of unsolicited email advertisements from biotech companies. I get so much that I am now going to fight back, again, by posting names of organizations that send biotech-related such unsolicited advertisements.

Here are some of the recent scofflaws in my inbox:

  • Malaysian Genomics Resource Centre. #1 Worst offender. I have unsubscribed from their email lists 100s of times and still keep getting their inane ads for various services. It is entirely possible they do useful stuff. But by the amount of SPAM they send out, I would doubt it.
  • EZBiolab – many emails from them.
  • Beckman Coullter – I have unsubscribed from their lists before but every once in a while get back on them
  • NIH – they seem to give out email addresses way too freely.
  • Drug Discovery News – can’t seem to get off their lists
  • Invitrogen (I have unsubscribed many times but keep getting new things from them).
  • Infocast Inc
  • VWR
  • qPCR news
  • Campbell Alliance

Please feel free to chime in with other examples. I am sure I am not the only person getting these.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Anyone else having gmail spam filtering issues?

Over the last week I have had a sudden increase in missing email messages, both from me and to me. Only by luck did I figure out that at least the missing incoming messages are being placed into the spam folder by gmail, which I run all my messages through since in the past their spam filter has been phenomenal.

The incoming messages included diverse messages – some with the word “FWD” in the subject line but some appearing as normal as can be.

Anyone else out there experiencing a sudden increase in missing email?

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–