14:30, Special Colloquium on Fraudulent Publishing in Mathematical Sciences

moderated by Jorge Buescu (EMS Vice-President, University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Abstract: In November 2023, Clarivate Plc announced that it had excluded the entire field of mathematics from the most recent edition of its influential list of authors of highly cited papers because of massive citation manipulation, which in return influences the so-called "Shanghai ranking" of top universities (or those claiming to be top). While most mathematicians would probably not care, the exclusion is in fact the tip of the iceberg of a parallel universe of predatory and mega-journals whose main purpose is to offer publishing opportunities for whoever is willing to pay the right price. I will explain how the system works, why we should care, and what measures we can all take against. In preparation, I invite you to think about the following questions: How often have you been contacted in the past months to attend a conference not in your field / submit a paper to  or edit a special issue in a journal you don't know / review an article within 10 days or so? What do you know about the following journals: "Mathematics", "Axioms" (published by MDPI), "Chaos, Solitons, Fractals" (Elsevier), "Advances in Difference Equations" (Springer)? Do you know the following mathematicians: Abdon Atangana, Dumitru Baleanu, Hari M. Srivastava?

This talk is related to my work as  Chair of the Committee on Publishing of the International Mathematical Union.

Suggested readers:
[1] https://www.mathunion.org/cop/documents/documents-produced-cop
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09877
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07257

• 15:30, Regular Seminar, moderated by Ana Ferreira (University of Minho, Portugal)

On the Classification of Almost Contact Metric Manifolds

Abstract: In 1990, D. Chinea and C. Gonzalez gave a classification of almost contact metric manifolds into 2^{12} classes, based on the behaviour of the covariant derivative of the fundamental 2-form. This large number makes it difficult to deal with this class of manifolds. We propose a new approach to almost contact metric manifolds by introducing two intrinsic endomorphisms S and h, which bear their name from the fact that they are, basically, the entities appearing in the intrinsic torsion. We present a new classification scheme for them by providing a simple flowchart based on algebraic conditions involving S and h, which then naturally leads to a regrouping of the Chinea-Gonzalez classes, and, in each step, to a further refinement, eventually ending in the single classes. This method allows a more natural exposition and derivation of both known and new results, like a new characterization of almost contact metric manifolds admitting a characteristic connection in terms of intrinsic endomorphisms. We also describe in detail the remarkable (and still very large) subclass of H-parallel almost contact manifolds. This is joint work with Dario Di Pinto, Giulia Dileo, and Marius Kuhrt.