Press release
17th May 2018, Oxford and Dubai
Think. Check. Attend, a new initiative, is announced today by Knowledge E, a Dubai based
information and service provider to the academic community. Based on Think Check
Submit—launched by a coalition of several organisations across the scholarly
communications community in response to mutual challenges for publishers, service
providers and universities alike—the new initiative follows the same structure and patternand provides a set of easy, practical steps for academics all over the world who want tocheck the suitability of a conference before submitting an abstract or agreeing to attend.
While each initiative was developed independently, the two have mutually endorsed eachother and both campaigns encourage scholars to use the services as a complement todisseminating academic research via journal publishing and research conference activities.
Researchers who want to determine the credentials of a conference are guided through aprocess whereby they will ‘Think’ about the risks posed by the increasing number ofconferences lacking rigour, ‘Check’ the conference against criteria shared by legitimate
academic events and ‘Attend’ only if the conference passes the checks and is deemed
trusted.
Philip J. Purnell, Director of Services at Knowledge E welcomed the move saying: “Weregularly field questions about the prestige and suitability of conferences and Think. Check.
Attend seems a natural progression to the corresponding Think Check Submit for which
Knowledge E also provided the Arabic and Persian versions.”
Matt McKay, Director of Communications at the International Association of Scientific,
Technical and Medical Publishers said: “Think. Check. Submit. was launched in 2015 to help
researchers understand their options, and the key criteria they should check before makingan informed decision about where to submit their research. We now warmly welcome theThink. Check. Attend campaign as a sister initiative designed to help researchers recognise
the characteristics of trusted conferences and events.”
About Think. Check. Submit
Think Check Submit. is a campaign to help researchers identify trusted journals for theirresearch. It is a simple checklist which researchers can use to assess the credentials of ajournal or publisher. The campaign has been produced with the support of a coalition fromacross scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing.
About Knowledge E
Knowledge E was established in 2012 and has quickly become synonymous withcollaboration, innovation and progression. Based in Dubai, UAE, at the centre of a region ofvision and ambition, Knowledge E works passionately with all types of organisations andgovernment entities within research and education to support their continued innovationand development by providing them with leading expertise, information resources andsoftware solutions. This does for example include the KnE eLibrary Solution for researchliterature discovery and the KnE Publishing Platform for open access journal and conference
proceedings publishing and indexing, along with associated research and publishing services
for capacity building within academia.