Beall's list and the watchlists that followed it
Jeffrey Beall, who named predatory publishing, kept the best-known blacklist of predatory publishers until 2017. When it closed, archived copies of it and other blacklists and whitelists, among them Cabells', took up the work, and Beall went on criticising open access and arguing for a credentialing system for journals.
Where the term and the list came from
Beall was a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, where he worked as an expert in metadata for library discovery systems. He moved to its Auraria Library in 2000, after ten years in the library at Harvard University, and for most of his library career researched library metadata, full-text searching and information retrieval. In 2012 he gained tenure and was promoted to associate professor. The roles of academic librarians were taking on increasing importance with the advent of scholarly open-access publishing. His interest in scholarly publishing began in 2005, as a scholarly initiatives librarian, and in 2008 he began tracking spam invitations to publish in what he would later call predatory journals. By the time he stopped his blog in 2017 he had been tracking scholarly publishing and the exponential growth of predatory publishers and standalone journals for nearly ten years.
Beall articulated the threat in 2008, when he first saw the emerging gold open-access model being exploited. That model shifts publishing from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish, and what began as an effort to foster innovation and widen worldwide access to new information was sometimes being co-opted by unscrupulous players seeking easy money. He spoke of the problem early on as an ethical issue inside the open-access movement. He detailed the threat such publishers posed to the scholarly literature by corrupting research communication, and called out the pseudoscience they spread, their fabricated editorial boards, opaque fees, insufficient or absent peer review, absence from PubMed and the Directory of Open Access Journals, and fake or unverified impact factors.
Beall coined the terms predatory publisher, hijacked journal, predatory conference and misleading metrics, and the name predatory journal is credited to him. The term predatory publisher dates from 2010, when he coined it to describe publishing that exploited the gold open-access model. He chose the name for its metaphor and for an alliteration that would make it easy to remember, knowing it was imperfect, and later found that it does not always translate well; others have advocated a different term, but predatory publisher caught on.
His first article on the subject was a 2009 review of Bentham Open in the Charleston Advisor, a journal that typically publishes reviews of the electronic databases librarians license. It showed the publisher exploiting gold open access with 200 journals, each with few articles, while charging authors high fees, and it alerted libraries to that publisher's transgressions and to the larger problem of linking to such sites, which flood the scholarly literature with poor-quality work. The review went largely ignored until late 2011, when the nursing research community, specifically the International Academy of Nursing Editors, took notice. That community felt vulnerable, realising that its many specialty fields would be targeted by the predators, and has since researched the subject extensively. Discussion of his list on that community's listserv drew significant attention, and interest spread to other research communities. His invited opinion piece in Nature in September 2012, "Predatory publishers are corrupting open access", increased attention on the subject and led to the term predatory publishing going viral. Researchers from all over the world then forwarded him spam from newly appearing predatory journals, tips on criteria for evaluating them and accounts of their own misfortunes, which provided evidence for his posts alongside what he uncovered on the publishers' websites. His work alerted the global research community to the deep threats predatory publishers posed in exploiting the gold open-access model, and advocated the protection of individual authors and the scholarly community by maintaining the integrity of the academic record.
How the list was built
Aiming to maintain the integrity of the academic record, Beall created a list of suspect scholarly publishers and shared it with the public on his blog. The list was free, and it exposed various types of deceptive practices, corruption of the editorial office and peer review, fraud and hidden publishing fees. Accounts of when the list began differ. In Beall's own account his first list appeared in 2010 and the blog, Scholarly Open Access, followed in 2012, with two posts a week. In others he compiled annual lists of potential, possible or probable predatory open-access journals from 2011 to January 2017, and Beall's List ran from 2011 to 2017. In others still, Beall's List itself began in 2012, as the blog. He kept the list on the blog from 2012 to 2017, and over that period predatory publishers grew from about 20 in 2011 to more than 1,100 in 2017. Under the title "Potential, Possible, or Probable Predatory Scholarly Open-Access Publishers", the blog listed publishers, standalone journals and meetings for medical professionals that Beall deemed predatory and that were designed to bilk unwary authors and meeting attendees out of financial resources. The list was essentially an assortment of blacklists of the vendors Beall considered potential, possible or probable predators.
Beall's reviews on the blog were comparable to book reviews, applying the skills he used in organising reviews of books or electronic databases for professional library journals, and he was clear that the list and its reviews were his opinion. Researchers who had unknowingly submitted to predatory publishers sent him evidence, often in a trail of emails: stories of egregious practices and solid evidence of transgressions of peer-review integrity, editorial standards, business ethics, indexing and archiving. Each post rested on such evidence or on evidence he came across himself, and he examined the publishers' websites for the number and quality of their articles and identified the practices that violated scholarly norms. With evidence from duped researchers and from the publishers' websites he uncovered how the publishers lured researchers, which institutional pressures such as the publish-or-perish mindset made worse. He focused on publishers, many of which had a fleet of journals, rather than on individual journals, because publishers added and removed titles so quickly that tracking individual journals would have been impractical and time-consuming. The list rested on an initial set of 26 criteria defining predatory behaviours, such as deceptive business practices, lack of ethics and integrity, and corruption of the scholarly literature. His criteria were meant to help authors recognise predatory journals. Shortly after the blog began, mentors urged him to document his criteria, which evolved through three versions in five years.
He wrote about select publishers, such as Frontiers or OMICS, tracking their fake addresses to actual locations, finding stolen identities and detailing the deceptive practices they used to lure authors, such as misleading metrics and claims of inclusion in prestigious scholarly indexes. On the blog he spent years tracking some of MDPI's troubling tactics. Some of the publishers and journals were so plainly fraudulent or silly that he wrote about them sardonically.
How the list was received
Beall's list was at first one of the few online resources designed to help researchers identify predatory publishers and meeting organisers, and later bogus metrics providers, and it was certainly the most famous. It was the first and most popular blacklist. Many applauded Beall and considered the list valuable, an invaluable resource for academic authors and librarians, but it had numerous critics. Whatever the view, the list was a popular place to check whether a journal or a meeting was likely a predator.
Some pointed out that, as one person's work, its evaluations were subjective and its criteria insufficiently transparent. Its reliability has been questioned because one individual compiled and maintained it. In 2013 the criticisms included his review criteria, the transparency of his methods for placing a publisher on his lists and other alleged biases, and in 2015 some of his professional library colleagues cited bias. Some fellow librarians questioned whether he overstated the threat or was biased towards an established power structure in traditional publishing that favours maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality and centrism. Beall and his list were controversial and criticised for the shortcomings of the blacklist approach, such as the use of the term predator, and for his critique of the open-access movement. As an outspoken critic of open access, he was sometimes accused of having an agenda to discredit the movement. Indeed, only open-access publishers and journals were listed, and subscription publishers and publications were not evaluated. His critics included the predatory publishers, the authors who published with them, and those who dismissed the value of his work because he was a critic of open access. One commentator argued in 2020 that misguided criticism of Beall himself had been counterproductive in the fight against fraudulent publishers.
Others felt a blacklist less desirable than a whitelist of publishers and journals thoroughly vetted and approved as legitimate and ethical. By 2013 the rise of questionable open-access operators had raised the question of whether their journals should be blacklisted, or whether it would be better to create a whitelist of open-access journals that meet certain standards.
The pressure on Beall and the list's closure
His university was of two minds. It favoured the positive attention his work brought it, but by 2013 that attention had a dark side: listed publishers began to lose income, complained, asked to be removed, and searched the university's website to harvest administrators' email addresses, and their mass emails made baseless accusations, such as that he was a criminal, whose motivation the university counsel quickly understood. Several publishers, OMICS among them in 2013, threatened to sue, and none did. In April 2019 a federal judge ordered the Indian publisher and conference organiser OMICS International to pay $50.1 million to resolve the Federal Trade Commission's allegations of deceptive claims and hidden article processing charges; its journals appeared frequently on Beall's list.
As of 3 January 2017 the list held 1,155 predatory publishers and 1,294 predatory journals. Later that month Beall removed the list from the internet. The website was shut down on 17 January 2017. The closure jolted the research community and rocked the medical publishing world. The blog's absence left a huge gap in scientific communication.
Accounts of why he closed it disagree. One says he removed the list after legal threats. A second says the removal could have been the result of professional or legal threats, which could not be confirmed at the time but did appear in Beall's own later account. A third says he shut the blog after consistent harassment by several notorious blacklisted publishers. A fourth says he ended it citing intense pressure from his employer. A fifth says the website was shut down for unclear reasons.
Within six months of shutting the blog Beall wrote an account of what he had learned about scholarly publishing, the pressure researchers face and the aggressive strategies some predatory publishers used to fight him. One of its main points was that researchers who publish in predatory journals often become their defenders. He went on writing articles and speaking about predatory publishing. He retired from his University of Colorado faculty position in 2018 and kept up with the subject through Google alerts. His publications on it since 2008 number nearly 40.
The archived list and the lists that followed
The list itself survives only as an online archive, and it is still used in that form. By March 2018 an anonymous European academic had retrieved it from internet archives, was providing access to it as it last stood, and appeared to be updating it at weekends; anyone using the copy does so at their own risk. As of October 2020 there was only one legitimate archived copy of Beall's List, at beallslist.net.
Since 2017 researchers have tried to update Beall's list or to create their own lists of predatory publishers or journals for developing countries. After Beall shut down the website, other scholars, who prefer to remain anonymous to prevent the harassment to which he was subjected, took up maintaining and updating the list. In December 2020 two major sites existed, Stop Predatory Journals and a new Beall's list. Stop Predatory Journals was built by an independent group that wishes to remain anonymous to avoid the harassment suffered by the creator and maintainer of Scholarly Open Access.
Both blacklists of predatory publications and whitelists of legitimate ones exist. The number of predatory publications is rising steadily, which makes blacklists difficult to keep updated, and predatory journals sometimes sneak into whitelists and go unnoticed. In 2016 the Directory of Open Access Journals delisted 3,300 of its 11,000 journals as questionable or inactive, to crack down on predatory journals.
Cabells' whitelist and blacklist
Cabells Scholarly Analytics, to which Beall acted as a consultant, evaluates journals against 60 criteria, maintains both a whitelist and a blacklist and sells subscriptions to them, and estimated that more than 12,000 predatory journals were active.
Cabells began in 1978, when the management professor David Cabell conceived a verified and verifiable list of journal information as a time-saving guide for researchers, tenure committees and doctoral students choosing where to publish business research. The first list included factors important for tenure, such as the times to review, accept and publish in a reputable journal in the management field, and in the early 2000s the directory expanded to the social sciences and computer sciences. That list grew into the Whitelist, now Journalytics, which indexed all areas except medicine, engineering and some humanities. In 2015 Cabells began work to vet predatory journals, building analytics for them judged by an internal review team. In 2017, by sheer coincidence several months after Beall removed his list early that year, it launched its Whitelist and its Blacklist, now Predatory Reports, as subscription products, with an initial listing of 4,000 predatory journals from 18 disciplines. The journals on it violated behavioural indicators of a publication's legitimacy, 60 in one account and more than 60 in another, covering integrity, peer review, website, metrics and indexing, and publication and business practices. Violations of the criteria are rated minor, moderate or severe. Predatory Reports is a searchable database that identifies the specific types of predatory behaviour Cabells specialists find among the indicators. Like Journalytics, it gives basic background on each journal, such as its publisher, website and geographic origin, but it alone gives a misconduct report on the journal's specific violations. Cabells tracks new trends in deception and invites researchers to alert it to new suspect journals.
Journalytics at first did not cover medical journals, although they have always been a significant part of Predatory Reports, because medical areas are huge and dynamic, with the most journals and a rapid churn of articles. Customers had great demand for a biomedical product listing medical journals, and Cabells took on medicine as a field that needs its own team of experts, database, criteria and analytics; in 2018 it assembled a team of auditors to review all titles in Journalytics annually and guide its product development in medicine. In 2021 Predatory Reports listed nearly 14,000 journals from all academic disciplines, of which more than 4,300, a third of the list, claimed to publish in medicine, multidisciplinary journals included. Journalytics then listed 11,000 titles and was to add a medical list of more than 5,000 journals. In September 2021 Cabells reported some 15,000 predatory journals, a third of them medical titles, and a grey zone of nearly 30,000.
Publishers push their titles to Cabells for review for Journalytics, and Cabells is judicious before assigning a title to either list. A common reason a journal does not make it into Journalytics is that it has not been publishing long enough or is too niche, since at least one or two years of citation data, robust peer review and a minimal level of activity are needed; with low citation, niche journals may never be listed on the Web of Science. Because most journals fall into the in-between area, a greylist of journals that meet the criteria for being neither scholarly nor predatory would hold more than 30,000 titles, more than Journalytics and Predatory Reports combined. Cabells finds medicine and the biological sciences the most difficult fields to characterise, and so is working on products beyond a list, such as a university system that might flag any author interacting with a predatory journal for research or submission.
Beall's critique of open access
Beall, who was always critical of the open-access movement, grants that open access offers reading free to everyone and reuse under the Creative Commons licence, but holds that it had major flaws, and argued that its advocates lacked foresight about its unintended consequences, such as the pollution of research databases, and kept promoting it even after the problems of predatory publishing had clearly emerged. In his view the movement tried to stigmatise and shut down the traditional publishers that use the subscription model to publish high-quality vetted research, whose publications on library platforms also added value by increasing access to resources and citations. His commentaries examined flaws in open access, the shortcomings of librarianship and the effects of widespread library cancellations of subscription journals. He holds that academic libraries, which play an important role in vetting publishers and maintaining online repositories of benefit to authors, largely failed to warn about the shortcomings of open access, and he has criticised the open-access repositories the movement inspired many libraries to create as expensive to operate yet little accessed. Librarians, in his view, also ignored the true causes of journal price increases in favour of the more politically correct advocacy of open access.
Beall's case for credentialing journals
Beall warned of a scholarly publishing industry that failed to regulate itself. He welcomes Cabells' effort and argues that scholarly publishing, having not adequately policed itself, needs a credentialing system, like pharmacy's, to separate bona fide journals and publishers acting in good faith from predatory ones. Before open access, libraries played an important role in not subscribing to junk journals and in preserving scholarly integrity.