The World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology or WASET is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals.
[6] WASET has been accused of arranging predatory conferences, in order to artificially boost the academic credentials of presenters and paper submitters.
[19][20] The conferences are low-quality, described in one case as a "Potemkin village"[21] and anyone can present a paper by simply paying the registration fee.
[31] They were furthermore included in Qualis, an official Brazilian system for classifying scientific literature, which guides researchers in choosing journals for publication.
[33][34][35] The group of journalists presented their findings at the 2018 DEF CON 26 conference in a talk entitled "Inside the Fake Science Factory".
The journalists state that their "findings highlight the prevalence of the pseudo-academic conferences, journals and publications and the damage they can and are doing to society".