Blacklists Lists of journals or publishers deemed either acceptable or unacceptable have been published.
Beall's List was an example of a free blacklist, and
Cabells' Predatory Reports is an example of a paid blacklist database. The
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) recommends against blindly trusting any list of fake or predatory journals, especially if they do not publish the criteria by which journals are evaluated. Some lists of purported predatory publishers have been criticized for being based on the authors' personal judgement, rather than objective evidence.
Directory of Open Access Journals is an example of a free whitelist. Other lists of pre-approved journals are available from large research funders.
Beall's List University of Colorado Denver librarian and researcher
Jeffrey Beall, who coined the term "predatory publishing", first published his list of predatory publishers in 2010. In 2013,
Nature reported that Beall's list and web site were "widely read by librarians, researchers, and open-access advocates, many of whom applaud his efforts to reveal shady publishing practices." Beall's analyses have been called sweeping generalizations with no supporting evidence, and he has also been criticized for being biased against open-access journals from less economically developed countries. A 2018 study has shown that Beall's criteria of "predatory" publishing were in no way limited to OA publishers and that, applying them to both OA and non-OA journals in the field of
library and information science, even top tier non-OA journals could be qualified as predatory. Similarly, another study reported on the difficulties of demarcating predatory and non-predatory journals in
biomedicine. One librarian wrote that Beall's list "attempts a binary division of this complex gold rush: the good and the bad. Yet many of the criteria used are either impossible to quantify..., or can be found to apply as often to established OA journals as to the new entrants in this area... Some of the criteria seem to make First World assumptions that aren't valid worldwide." Beall differed with these opinions and wrote a letter of rebuttal in mid-2015. Following the ''
Who's Afraid of Peer Review?'' investigation, the DOAJ has tightened up its inclusion criteria, with the purpose of serving as a
whitelist, very much like Beall's has been a
blacklist. The investigation found that "the results show that Beall is good at spotting publishers with poor quality control." for relying heavily on analysis of publishers' web sites, not engaging directly with publishers, and including newly founded but legitimate journals. Beall has responded to these complaints by posting the criteria he uses to generate the list, as well as instituting an anonymous three-person review body to which publishers can appeal to be removed from the list. An unedited sentence from the letter read: "Let us at the outset warn you that this is a very perilous journey for you and you will be completely exposing yourself to serious legal implications including criminal cases lunched against you in INDIA and USA." Beall responded that the letter was "poorly written and personally threatening" and expressed his opinion that the letter "is an attempt to detract from the enormity of OMICS's editorial practices". OMICS' lawyers stated that damages were being pursued under section 66A of India's
Information Technology Act, 2000, which makes it illegal to use a computer to publish "any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character" or to publish false information. Beall could have been sued for
defamation, and would not have been able to fall back on truth as a final defense; under section 66A, the truth of any information is irrelevant if it is grossly offensive. As such, it is not possible for the OMICS Group to proceed against Beall under section 66A, but it could mount a defamation case. Finally, in August 2016, OMICS was sued for "deceptive business practices related to journal publishing and scientific conferences" by the Federal Trade Commission (a US government agency), who won an initial court ruling in November 2017. Beall's list was used as an authoritative source by South Africa's Department of Higher Education and Training in maintaining its list of accredited journals: articles published in those journals will determine funding levels for their authors; however, journals identified as predatory will be removed from this list.
ProQuest is reviewing all journals on Beall's list, and has started removing them from the
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences. In January 2017, Beall shut down his blog and removed all its content, citing pressure from his employer. Beall's supervisor wrote a response stating that he did not pressure Beall to discontinue his work, or threaten his employment; and had tried hard to support Beall's academic freedom. In 2017, Ramzi Hakami reported on his own successful attempt to get an intentionally poor paper accepted by a publisher on the list and referenced a resurrected version of Beall's list. This version includes Beall's original list and updates by an anonymous purported "postdoctoral researcher in one of the [E]uropean universities [who has] a hands-on experience with predatory journals."
Cabells' Predatory Reports At the May 2017 meeting of the
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Cabell's International, a company that offers scholarly publishing analytics and other scholarly services, announced that it intended to launch a blacklist of predatory journals (not publishers) in June, and said that access would be by subscription only. The company had started work on its blacklist criteria in early 2016. In July 2017, both a black list and a white list were offered for subscription on their website.
Other blacklists Since Beall's list closed, other list groups have started. These include Kscien's list, which used Beall's list as a starting point, updating it to add and remove publishers. In 2020, the
Ministry of Science and Technology of China ordered Chinese
Center of Scientometrics to launch a blacklist called Chinese Early Warning Journal List (EWJL). EWJL classifies journals into three grades: low, medium, or high risk, rather than two (predatory or not) like most other lists. Nevertheless, there is an ongoing criticism of this list as well. According to a 2020
systematic review of 93 lists, only three were assessed as evidence-based according to the authors' criteria.
Science funders Multiple science funders have taken special measures against predatory publishing, especially in terms of
national journal rankings.
Poland On 18 September 2018, Zbigniew Błocki, the director of the
National Science Centre, the largest agency that funds fundamental research in Poland, stated that if articles financed by NCN funds were published in journals not satisfying standards for peer review, then the grant numbers would have to be removed from the publications and funds would have to be returned to the NCN.
Russia Both the
Russian Science Foundation and the
Russian Foundation for Basic Research require their grant recipients to publish only in the journals included into either
Web of Science or
Scopus databases. This policy aims at (1) preventing the researchers from falling into the traps of predatory publishers, without having the Foundations to issue their own lists of acceptable journals; (2) making sure that the results of their funded works are readily discovered by other people, as Web of Science and Scopus are subscribed to by most reputable institutions. However, in parallel with the withdrawal of
Clarivate from Russia in 2022 and the pause in
Elsevier services from 2022 onwards, the Web of Science and Scopus listings are no longer considered as essential by the Russian agencies.
Other efforts More transparent peer review, such as
open peer review and
post-publication peer review, has been advocated to combat predatory journals. Others have argued instead that the discussion on predatory journals should not be turned "into a debate over the shortcomings of peer review—it is nothing of the sort. It is about fraud, deception, and irresponsibility..." In an effort to "set apart legitimate journals and publishers from non-legitimate ones", principles of transparency and best practice have been identified and issued collectively by the
Committee on Publication Ethics, the DOAJ, the
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors. Various journal review websites (crowd-sourced or expert-run) have been started, some focusing on the quality of the peer review process and extending to non-OA publications. A group of libraries and publishers launched an awareness campaign. A number of measures have been suggested to further combat predatory journals. Others have called on research institutions to improve the publication literacy notably among junior researchers in developing countries. Some organisations have also developed criteria in which predatory publishers could be spotted through providing tips. As Beall has ascribed predatory publishing to a consequence of
gold open access (particularly its
author-pays variant), one researcher has argued for platinum open access, where the absence of
article processing charges removes the publisher's
conflict of interest in accepting article submissions. More objective discriminating metrics have been proposed, such as a "predatory score" and positive and negative journal quality indicators. The International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE) have encouraged authors to consult subject-area expert-reviewed journal listings, such as the Directory of Nursing Journals, vetted by their organisation, and to make use of Jeffrey Beall's open-access list of predatory journals. Bioethicist
Arthur Caplan has warned that predatory publishing, fabricated data, and academic plagiarism erodes public confidence in the medical profession, devalues legitimate science, and undermines public support for
evidence-based policy. In 2015, Rick Anderson, associate dean in the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, challenged the term itself: "what do we mean when we say 'predatory,' and is that term even still useful?... This question has become relevant because of that common refrain heard among Beall's critics: that he only examines one kind of predation—the kind that naturally crops up in the context of author-pays OA." Anderson suggests that the term "predatory" be retired in the context of scholarly publishing. "It's a nice, attention-grabbing word, but I'm not sure it's helpfully descriptive... it generates more heat than light." A 2017 article in
The New York Times suggests that a significant number of academics are "eager" to publish their work in these journals, making the relationship more a "new and ugly symbiosis" than a case of scholars being exploited by "predators". In May 2018, the
University Grants Commission in India removed 4,305 dubious journals from a list of publications used for evaluating academic performance. To further define and distinguish predatory journals, Leonhard Dobusch and Maximilian Heimstädt in 2019 proposed a tripartite classification of Open Access journals with below-average peer review quality. Based on their procedures, there would be 1) "aspirant" 2) "junk" and 3) "fake" journals. While aspirant journals are science-oriented despite their below-average peer review (e.g. student-run journals), junk and fake journals are predominantly or exclusively profit-oriented. Junk and fake Open Access journals have superficial or no peer review procedures, despite their claims of being peer-reviewed. In April 2019, 43 participants from 10 countries met in Ottawa, Canada to formulate a consensus definition: "Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices." Adequacy of peer review was not included in the definition because this factor was deemed too subjective to evaluate. Critics of this definition argued that excluding the quality of peer review from the definition "could strengthen rather than weaken" predatory journals. In March 2022, the
InterAcademy Partnership published a report,
Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences, with a series of recommendations. This study emphasized, that predatory publishing practices is not a binary (good or bad) phenomenon, but rather a spectrum. They proposed the following classification: :a)
hijacked journals, which mimic existing reputable journals; :b) journals which
re-publish papers from legitimate journals (see
OMICS); :c) journals which
deceive their potential authors by "giving false or misleading information about their publishing charges, the services they provide (like indexing, peer-review, or having an impact factor), where the publisher is based, or the identity of the owner, editor or members of the editorial board." :d)
low-quality journals, which are characterised by poor cumulative criteria (such as disregarding negative reviews of manuscripts and publishing articles outside the declared journal's scope), without an apparent deceitful intent (see
MDPI and
Frontiers Media). Some journals can be simultaneously classified into two or more categories. == See also ==