Beware of VIDEA!

What you find here is very shocking information on the "scientific" conference VIDEA'95 organised by the Wessex Institute of Technology. To prevent such cases in the future, please take time and read the paper ``WARNING: Beware of VIDEA'' presented here. We promise, that you will not be only shocked, but that you will also have much fun! All given information is absolutely true and can be proven by us.

Now this page also contains our answers to selected reactions, as well as a complete set of all reactions within two weeks and a collection of Prof. Brebbia's answers on the web. Please, make up your own mind!

Now also available: set of all reactions within seven months.

Please, distribute this URL (http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~wp/videa.html) to all colleagues in technological fields who could be affected by these activities of the Wessex Institute of Technology (can be reached via email to CMI@ib.rl.ac.uk). We would appriciate, if you could mail these pages to your colleagues. For that purpose, a pure text version of the main story is available as well.

In 1998 the authors have learned of a similar story in physics by Alan D. Sokal, who managed to get a complete 35 page paper to be published in a well-known journal. You can find Sokal's parody article on the Web also.

But also some scientists have a very unorthodox way of working. In 1995 the Organizing Committee of the EURO-PAR´95 conference revealed cases of plagiarism which were committed by C. V. Papadopoulos. It turned out that he already had a long list of publications which he had generated by copying the work of other authors. Read the full story here.

In 2005 Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn, Dan Aguayo, three students from MIT, created the program SCIgen with which it is possible to write random papers immediately. With this tool they submitted papers to some conferences with success! On their webpages you can also find additional links to "Related Work".

In 2008 an interview with Carlos Brebbia demonstrated that the WIT people are still active.

In January 2009 a similar fake conference (CITE 2008) was documented by using the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator SCIgen: Herbert Schlangemann Blog.

In June 2013 we were made aware by Paul Colin Gloster of another statement from the WIT distributed in 1995, online at: Statement of WIT.

In November 2014 we got knowledge of the acceptance of a spam paper at the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (IJACT) journal: Get me off Your F... Mailing List :-).

In January 2015 we got knowledge of the acceptance of a paper by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel and Jim Jong Fun at 2 International Journals (Journal Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and Aperito Journal of Nanoscience Technology): Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations, an absolute nonsensical text also produced with SCIgen! Reading the report you will find out that the number of online journals has exploded in the last few years and that more than half of them accept merely anything... Beall's List gives a overview of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers, currently with 550 entries!

In July 2018 we were pointed to an article describing the acceptance of a paper about a fake study on toilet habits from Gary Lewis by Crimson Publishers.

In April 2019 we were pointed to a YouTube video Inside the Fake Science Factories produced by Creative Commons (in German). There is also an English version of the talk.

Also in April 2019 we were informed that in 2013 IEEE and Springer Publishing removed more than 120 papers from their sites after a French researcher’s analysis determined that they were generated via SCIgen. See: How Three Students Fooled Scientific Journals . More information on SCIgen can be found at Wikipedia’s SCIgen page , that contains other interesting tidbits, such as this paper that found 85 fake papers in the IEEE’s archives!

Werner Purgathofer, Eduard Groeller, Martin Feda
Institute of Visual Computing & Human-Centered Technology, TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology)
Karlsplatz 13 / 193-02, email: wp (at) cg.tuwien.ac.at
A-1040 Wien / Austria, WWW: http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/

Enclosed paper: ``WARNING: Beware of VIDEA''
by Werner Purgathofer, Eduard Groeller, and Martin Feda.