Collective Action Is Required to Reduce the Burden of Spam Emails in Academia: The Case of Neuroscience

Publishing the email address of corresponding authors alongside academic articles is part of an author being publicly accountable for published academic content, but also benefits both authors and potential readers. However, unscrupulous actors exploit the public availability of author email addresses and spam academic authors with unwanted emails that offer them limited academic benefit, with possible financial or reputational risks. To highlight some problems associated with academic spam, we focus on examples from the field of neuroscience. A total of 51 unsolicited emails related to neuroscience were received by two researchers between 1 and 26 November 2025, and qualified using a mixed-methods approach. Several categories of spam email were discovered, validating a recent taxonomy of 20 “red flags” for phishing e-mails. This suggests that spam poses both individual and collective harms to the academic community. We also focus on the 2026 guidelines by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) toward predatory journals and spam, but consider that its author-led approach to responsibility may amount to victim blaming, by assuming that the prey has the largest onus to act. We outline the responsibilities regarding academic spam of different interest holders, including but not limited to journals and publishers, who should collectively act to reduce the burden that spam emails place on authors. We include suggestions for updates to the ICMJE recommendations and related editorials.