Beall's List

Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog Scholarly Open Access. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not perform real peer review, effectively publishing any article as long as the authors pay the article processing charge. Originally started as a personal endeavor in 2008, Beall's List became a widely followed piece of work by the mid-2010s. The list was used by scientists to identify exploitative publishers and detect publisher spam.[1][2]

The influence of Beall's List led some publishers on the list to threaten defamation lawsuits against Beall, as well as to lodge official complaints against Beall's work to the University of Colorado. In January 2017, Beall removed the list from his blog, scholarlyoa.com. Six months later, he published an article in the journal Biochemia Medica claiming that pressure from his employer led to the blog shutdown,[3] although the university's official statement and a response by Beall's direct supervisor both disputed this account.[4] The closure of Beall's List was cited by some as a loss of an important resource,[5] and successors have set out to continue Beall's work.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Basken2017a was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Watson, Roger (2017). "Beall's list of predatory open access journals: RIP". Nursing Open. 4 (2): 60. doi:10.1002/nop2.78. PMC 5340161. PMID 28286661. It provided an easy checklist against the flood of uninvited emails from unknown publishers…
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference biochemia was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Swauger2017 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Spears, Tom (January 17, 2017). "World's main list of 'predatory' science publishers vanishes with no warning". Ottawa Citizen. Retrieved January 18, 2017.