“Guest-post SPAM” is a thing now

Image: SPAM-flavoured macadamia nuts (own work; CC BY 4.0).  Look, these nuts horrified me as much as they horrify you – but I have to admit, they were pretty good.

We’re all accustomed to fake-journal spam and fake-conference spam by now.  But I’ve started to get a new flavour of spam in my inbox: guest-post spam.

Here’s the thing: I’ve had some really nice guest posts on Scientist Sees Squirrel*, and I’d be happy to have some more.  Guest posts offer some different perspective, and the world certainly needs more than just mine.  But here’s the latest guest-post spam to come my way:

A month of spamvitations

Photo:  Wall of SPAM © Lee Coursey via flickr.com CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Esteemed contributor.  Revered speaker.  Renowned researcher. You get these e-mails too: invitations to publish papers in fake* journals, to join fake editorial boards, to speak at fake conferences.  I’d certainly known I got a lot of them; but that was unquantified, because I usually just grin at their clumsy phrasing and then delete them without further thought.  “What”, I thought, “would happen if I kept track of them all for a month?  Would I learn anything?  Could I milk a blog post out of it?”