Materials of correspondence conferences as a means of scientific communication

In the development of scientific communications a few years ago there appeared a new phenomenon - a multidisciplinary scientific collections, promising unconditional publication and posting electronic versions of publications in RISC, the presence of ISBN. One of their varieties are materials of correspondence conferences. Based on the study of 50 collections published in 2012-2016, containing 4250 articles written by almost 4500 authors and RISC data, the article describes the organizers of the correspondence conferences, authors scientometrics, publishing their articles in these materials, alt-metrics of these collections. The detailed analysis of the titles of such materials is given, as well as the characteristics of events and publications, their structure. The analysis of altmetrical indicators of such collections in RISC has shown that the correspondence form of a conference as a form of scientific communication is not compensated by RISC services. Almost all of these collections have zero citations. The analysis of authors affiliations submitting articles in such collections, and their publication activity has revealed that the vast majority of authors - the staff of the national universities. The study of correspondence conference collections has shown that they are not real means of scientific communications, as they do not respond to communication tasks of a conferences. The materials have a low scientific value. But as their publishers adhere to the terms of publication and place the collections in RISC, they have become a successful platform for any publications of any professional in any subject field. From the scientific point of view, in the best case such publications are "pen test" for young professionals, in the worst - generate informational noise. Such publications are exclusively perform the reporting function.

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