The grift is to get page fees from authors who don't know how to science. It is of no advantage to the author to be published in one of that journals. Anyone with any experience at all will look up a journal they don't know to see if it is a real one or not.

Plenty of stuff that is good is "open access." It means that the authors (or the people funding the study) paid the journal more than usual so that the journal does not limit access to the article to people who subscribe or pay for access somehow.

"Academia.edu" might be a scam in a different way than the fake-journal way. I never heard of it.

It at least started out as a sort of social networking site for academics. You can post stuff you've published elsewhere (or preprints) and get various metrics about who's reading and downloading your publications. I didn't know they published their own journals now.

It started as an ordinary snake cult.

I used to get so much spam for Research Gate, but none for this.

I think my favorite university that I know nothing about might be Midwestern State University, because it sounds so bogus.

I think the tunnel-vision of Texans led them to believe that it sounds like "The Midwest Part of Texas" State U, and not "Generic Flyover State U".

Yes. It sounds like a fake rival team in a movie about college football.

Like "Nebraska State" or "Kansas A & M".

I get emails nearly every day from academia.edu with the exciting news that some number of newly published academic papers mention my name. For a moment, I enjoy imagining a scenario in which the mention is actually referring to me, and then I go on with my inglorious existence.

Speaking of fake schools, did you see the story about the fake high school that got ESPN to televise its terrible football team?

https://deadspin.com/what-we-know-about-bishop-sycamore-the-fake-football-t-1847591930

Sign in, claim that bio, and then start submitting total nonsense to other journals until the real guy pays you to stop.

I could not be more delighted to know that there are other, more famous, Fluffykins Hussein Obamas.

Like the fake Sri Lankan handball team? I recently learned about that fun story.

The other thread triggered a thought. Hiring claims adjusters to review complicated forms to make it hard for health care providers to get paid and then having the doctors hire people to do the insurance forms is basically the shit-eating GNP boost.

The OP seems a little mean-spirited. Yes, foreigners speak funny. But it isn't even true, let alone Bleeding Obvious, that the Balkans are incapable of liberal democracy, whatever Sacha Baron Cohen may say. Albania is doing surprisingly well these days, as are Slovenia, Greece and a few others.

I'm still afraid of Serbians because this one guy tried to explain to me why they were completely forced to attempt genocidal war. This was before Trump, back when I regarded such things as incomprehensible.