The blacklist is dead; long live the blacklist. Five months after a widely read blog listing possible ‘predatory’ scholarly journals and publishers was shut down, another index of untrustworthy titles is appearing — although this version will be available only to paying subscribers.
Scholarly-services firm Cabell’s International in Beaumont, Texas, says that on 15 June it will launch its own list of predatory journals: those that deceive their authors or readers, for example by charging fees to publish papers without conducting peer review. The firm described its work on 31 May, at the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston, Massachusetts.
The previous, now-defunct, list was run by academic librarian Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado Denver. Since 2010, he had tracked what he called “potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” and journals on his blog, attracting huge attention and some legal threats from publishers unhappy at their inclusion. But in January this year, Beall deleted the site, without saying why. Cached copies have been posted elsewhere online.
