Spam emails in academia: issues and costs

Academic research output is increasing at a very fast growth rate per year. Given this expansion, new publishers will enter the market or existing publishers will introduce new journals to capture the rapidly expanding intellectual contributions in scholarly publishing. It is thus natural that when competing factions, new and pre-existing publishers, vie to capture this expansion that inter-journal and inter-publisher competition arises. This competitive environment may induce unhealthy competition with the use of inappropriate or unacceptable tactics to gain a share of the expanding market. In the recent open access era, questionable review, pricing, managerial and marketing practices by journals or publishers that claim to be scholarly are broadly referred to as “predatory”. One way to capture some of the expanding market is to use unsolicited emails, referred to as spam emails, to attract customers. This method has always been a questionable business practice that imposes costs. In this paper we address issues associated with spam emails, and our conservative estimate of the external costs of spam from publishers and journals amounts to US$ 1.1 billion per year. When all spam emails are included in the calculation, the cost rises to approximately US$ 2.6 billion per year. Academics that respond to spam emails from journals that do not conduct peer review also risk damaging their careers by publishing their intellect in such outlets. Finally, spam emails may include phishing attacks, which also result in financial losses. By making academics aware of these costs we hope measures can be taken by affected institutes to reduce the negative externality of spam emails and offer some potential solutions.