Did every freaking scientist in the world get that Frontiers spam?
April 20, 2010
Apparently every scientist I know got this spam yesterday:
Dear Joachim Schachtner
Considering your great expertise I would like to invite you to review the below appended article submitted to Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.
Please kindly communicate your decision within 3 days by logging into your Frontiers account and selecting “My Frontiers => Review Editor => Review Invitations Received”.
If you accept, you will then have 10 days to submit your review.
From these Frontiers in ding dongs who seem to send me more irrelevant email than not.
Even worse, a few of our colleagues were a little slow to realize that the stupid Frontiers outfit allowed the recipients to post to their spam list! So every reply from helpful scientists saying “um, that wasn’t supposed to go to me..” was a reply-all!!! Aggh! I can see the first one or two maybe, but who the hell doesn’t realize what is going on after that and stop with the replying already?
DrugMonkey 
April 20, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Is this an unusually nasty Term and Condition?
“3.4 No images or graphics provided by or through Frontiers may be copied or published elsewhere without the specific written consent of Frontiers. The Author shall be liable (jointly and severally where the Author consists of more than one person) to Frontiers for any damage or liability suffered by Frontiers as a result of any unauthorised copying or publication of graphics or images.”
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April 20, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Ha, I got it too, along with all the bazzillion “you’ve got the wrong person” replies!
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April 20, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Even IT professionals are sometimes bitten by the Reply-All-of-Doom.
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April 20, 2010 at 1:35 pm
When that happens to an email list my friends and I are on, we start making up fake clueless reply-alls mocking the heck out of the real reply-all-ers, and sending them to only the people we know. I’ve scared the crap out of my friends a few times, by making them think I ACTUALLY replied-all with the snarky email! Good times.
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April 20, 2010 at 1:54 pm
“So every reply from helpful scientists saying “um, that wasn’t supposed to go to me..” was a reply-all […]”
Oh man, that joke never gets old! I love that, unless it happens to my inbox. =P
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April 20, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Of course, my solution to such issues is never to volunteer to review manuscripts for anyone unless it’s someone I know and they ask me at least three times. 🙂
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April 20, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Orac, I’ve never responded once to these Frontiers people and never have the emails been relevant to me. I categorize them as spammers.
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April 20, 2010 at 2:45 pm
I’ve ben trying to get off their email list for at least 6 months…
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April 20, 2010 at 3:31 pm
I didn’t get this – I feel so left out.
I recently got an invite to be in the next Who’s Who, so I haven’t been totally neglected.
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April 20, 2010 at 5:05 pm
I got this and the Who’s Who invite. I’m on ALL the lists, baby!
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April 20, 2010 at 7:59 pm
I get Who’s Who and invitations to submit to every new journal that comes from Elsevier or Springer, no matter how far removed the topic is from my research. “Current Opinions in Widget and Attachment Science” wants my work!
Frontiers in whatever is off my chart. (But did you want to share that name up there, DM? It’s not yours, is it?)
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April 20, 2010 at 8:56 pm
“Current Opinions in Widget and Attachment Science” wants my work!
ummm…do you study sex toys?
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April 20, 2010 at 11:55 pm
I made that journal up, silly cycloprof.
Does anyone else get very short notice invitations to attend meetings in China that are only relevant to their work in the most tenuous imaginable way? Or is this an Antipodean thing?
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April 21, 2010 at 7:04 am
Hell yeah I got it to. Remind me to add them to spam for the next eon.
Doc F.
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April 22, 2010 at 1:20 am
Ginger
I’m glad to hear it’s a Antipodean thing and not just an -antipodean thing
-antipodean
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April 26, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Yeah, I got it too… and all he other 10,000 replies replies that followed.
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April 27, 2010 at 5:47 pm
I trashed my copy of the original email. Does anyone still have it? Can you confirm that the manuscript was actually attached to the email? Some journalist is asking me.
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April 27, 2010 at 7:16 pm
No, there was a click through link. I never clicked it, so I don’t know, but I suspect you’d not get to the article through the link — but would receive a further link if you “accepted the invitation.”
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