© BRYAN SATALINOFrom 2009 until early this year, University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall shed unprecedented light on questionable publishing practices with his “blacklist” of hundreds of publishers he considered predatory. The now-defunct list included journals that he deemed unethical for a number of reasons, including their excessive article-processing charges, atypical copyright policies, and shoddy—or nonexistent—peer review. Although Beall took down his list in January, a few months later the academic publishing consultancy Cabell’s International announced its own blacklist, which, like Beall’s, identifies journals that the Beaumont, Texas–based company considers questionable. (Unlike Beall’s list, Cabell’s blacklist is only available for a fee.)
But this new resource fails to address a lingering criticism of such blacklists. “One of the objections that people sometimes had to Beall’s list was, ‘We don’t need to identify and call out the scammers; we just need to identify and certify legitimate publishers,’” Rick Anderson, president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and associate dean for collections and scholarly communication at the University of Utah, tells The Scientist.
To this end, Anderson and others advocate for the use of “whitelists” in addition to or in place of blacklists. Even before Beall’s list came online, for example, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provided researchers with a freely available list of open-access publishers that the organization had vetted in a process outlined on ...
