Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers

Originally: Scholarly Open Access blog, University of Colorado Denver · Now: beallslist.net (anonymously maintained archive) · Active 2008–2017; archive updated sporadically since

Overview

Beall's List is the most influential reference resource in the history of predatory publishing watchdog activity — a blacklist of open-access journals and publishers identified as failing to perform genuine peer review while charging authors article processing fees, compiled by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, between 2008 and 2017. At its peak it listed more than 1,163 publishers and 1,311 standalone journals, was cited in academic papers, adopted in institutional publishing guidelines, and used by researchers worldwide to evaluate whether a journal invitation was legitimate or a spam-driven revenue operation. Beall coined the term "predatory publishing" — now standard across the academic publishing literature — and the list, despite its many documented flaws, remains the foundational reference for the problem it named. Its removal in January 2017, under pressure Beall later described as coming from his university employer and from legal threats by listed publishers, is itself one of the most significant institutional events in modern scholarly communication. The archived version now maintained at beallslist.net by an anonymous European postdoctoral researcher continues to be widely consulted, though it is no longer updated with the regularity or scope of the original.

The list exists at the intersection of several forces with immediate relevance to Newsjunkie's knowledge sector coverage: the structural economics of open-access publishing (the "author pays" model that creates incentives for low-quality publishers to maximize submission volume rather than research quality); the relationship between institutional pressure and individual scholarly speech; the difficulty of maintaining a community watchdog resource without institutional support; and the broader question of how research integrity is monitored in a publishing ecosystem that has expanded faster than its verification mechanisms.

Origin: Jeffrey Beall and the Flood of Spam Invitations

Jeffrey Beall's interest in predatory publishing began in 2008 with a simple trigger: he started receiving a flood of unsolicited email invitations from newly founded open-access journals asking him to serve on their editorial boards. He found the emails fascinating — most contained numerous grammatical errors, claimed implausible editorial credentials, and came from publishers he had never heard of. The pattern was consistent with the structural logic of the emerging author-pays open-access model: if a journal's revenue comes from publication fees charged to submitting authors rather than from subscriptions charged to readers, the incentive is to accept as many manuscripts as possible regardless of quality, while performing minimal or fraudulent peer review. The editorial board invitation spam was a recruitment tactic — a way of lending credibility to a journal that had none.

Beall began documenting these publishers systematically, applying a set of 52 criteria he developed to evaluate whether a publisher was operating legitimately. The criteria included: lack of transparency about article processing fees, editorial board members who could not be verified or had not consented to membership, false claims about indexing in established databases, misleading impact factor claims, aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation of submissions, no disclosed physical address, insufficient information about the peer review process, and similar markers of institutional bad faith. In 2011 he published the first version of the list on his blog, Scholarly Open Access, with 18 publishers. By December 2016, the list had grown to 923 publishers.

Key History

2008

Beall begins documenting predatory publishers

Jeffrey Beall, Scholarly Communications Librarian at University of Colorado Denver, starts receiving and cataloging suspicious editorial board invitation emails from newly founded open-access journals.

2011

First published list: 18 publishers

The list is published on Beall's blog Scholarly Open Access (scholarlyoa.com) with an initial 18 publishers. Beall coins the term "predatory publishing" and "predatory open-access publishers." The list gains rapid attention from librarians, researchers, and universities worldwide.

2012

Tenure granted; blog formally launched; backlash begins

Beall is granted tenure at University of Colorado Denver. The blog's profile rises, as does the backlash: publishers on the list begin contacting Beall directly, writing to his senior colleagues, and making ethics complaints. OMICS International announces it will sue for $1 billion in damages.

2013

Legal threats escalate; OMICS and Canadian Centre for Science and Education

Canadian Center for Science and Education threatens a defamation lawsuit. OMICS International follows with its billion-dollar suit threat. Beall's critics within the library community also intensify: CUNY librarians Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella publish criticism of the list's bias against journals from less-developed countries. (OMICS was later fined $50 million by the FTC in 2019 for deceptive practices — validating Beall's inclusion.)

2016

List reaches 923 publishers; university pressure intensifies

By December 2016 the list covers 923 publishers. Internally, Beall reports that his university launched a research misconduct investigation against him (later cleared after seven months). An "unqualified, mendacious supervisor" was placed over him, he later wrote, who "constantly attacked and harassed me." The legal and institutional pressures compound.

January 15, 2017

List removed without warning

The entire content of scholarlyoa.com vanishes overnight, along with Beall's faculty page at the University of Colorado Denver. No advance notice; no farewell post. The academic community notices within 24 hours. Speculation about the cause — lawsuit, hacking, employer pressure — swirls for days. Beall declines comment. CU Denver says the decision was Beall's own.

June 2017

Beall explains the shutdown

In an article in Biochemia Medica, Beall confirms that employer pressure drove the decision: "In January 2017, facing intense pressure from my employer, the University of Colorado Denver, and fearing for my job, I shut down the blog and removed all its content from the blog platform." He also describes a misconduct investigation and sustained harassment from a supervisor installed above him. He retires from the university in 2018.

2017–present

Anonymous archive at beallslist.net

An anonymous European postdoctoral researcher creates and maintains an archived version of the list at beallslist.net, preserving the January 15, 2017 state of the original and adding new entries as a separate update section. The anonymous maintainer explicitly states they will only update links and add notes, not substantively curate at the scale Beall did.

What the Archive Contains

The current beallslist.net archive is organized into several sections. The main Publishers list is the frozen original, an alphabetical directory of publishers flagged as potentially predatory — running from numeric entries through the alphabet with hundreds of entries per letter in the densest sections. The Standalone Journals list covers journals that operate without a clearly identified publisher. A Vanity Press section documents book publishers operating on similar deceptive principles. Hijacked Journals documents cases of legitimate established journals whose names and/or websites have been cloned by bad actors to deceive authors. Misleading Metrics covers services providing false or fabricated journal impact metrics.

Publishers

Main list; ~923 entries at January 2017 shutdown. Alphabetical, searchable.

Standalone Journals

Journals without identifiable legitimate publisher. ~1,311 entries at shutdown.

Vanity Press

Book publishers operating on deceptive fee-for-publication models.

Hijacked Journals

Legitimate journals whose names or websites have been cloned by fraudulent actors to deceive submitting authors.

Misleading Metrics

Services providing fabricated or misleading journal impact factors and indexing claims.

How to Recognize Predatory Journals

Guidance page distilling Beall's original 52 criteria into accessible warning signs for researchers evaluating a journal or publisher invitation.

Criticism and Contested Legacy

Beall's List was never without critics, and the debate over its fairness, transparency, and ideological character is as much a part of its legacy as the list itself. The most substantive criticisms: the list was maintained by a single person with no formal appeal process, no stated criteria transparent enough to be independently applied, and no accountability mechanism — if Beall decided a publisher was predatory, they were listed, and challenging the decision was difficult. CUNY librarians Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella argued persuasively that the list exhibited geographic bias — that imperfect English or a predominantly non-Western editorial board was treated as evidence of predation when it might instead reflect that a journal was operating in a less-resourced context. Rick Anderson of the University of Utah challenged the term "predatory" itself as more inflammatory than informative, preferring "deceptive publishing" and arguing that Beall conflated lower quality with predatory intent.

Beall was also an open critic of the open-access movement more broadly — not only of predatory publishers but of the Gold OA model in general — which created a conflict of interest that his critics noted: his list could be used to delegitimize genuine open-access journals alongside fraudulent ones, and his institutional affiliations and views gave some of his listings the appearance of ideological opposition to OA rather than neutral watchdog activity. A 2020 review in BMC Medicine found that Beall's List did not meet the study's evidence-based criteria for predatory identification checklists. A 2021 study in The Journal of Academic Librarianship confirmed Beall's bias against OA journals.

The strongest counterargument to these criticisms is the OMICS case. OMICS International — one of the most notorious publishers on Beall's list, which threatened him with a $1 billion defamation suit in 2012 — was fined $50.1 million by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for "deceiving academics and researchers into publishing in its journals and attending its conferences." Beall had been right. The legal threat was itself evidence of the problem he was documenting.

The Alternatives: What Replaced Beall's List

After the January 2017 shutdown, several resources emerged or expanded to partially fill the gap. Cabell's Scholarly Analytics — a commercial, subscription-based service — developed both a journal blacklist and a whitelist, praised for greater transparency than Beall but inaccessible to researchers without institutional subscriptions. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) maintains a curated whitelist of legitimate open-access journals with rigorous application criteria, which underwent a major overhaul in 2014 to remove questionable journals. Stop Predatory Journals, an anonymous group, maintains a parallel resource. Retraction Watch, while focused on post-publication misconduct rather than publisher evaluation, provides adjacent coverage. The Norwegian Scientific Index added a "Level X" category in 2021 for journals suspected of predatory practices. None of these resources has achieved the name recognition or practical usage of Beall's List at its peak — a reflection of both the unique personality behind it and the institutional insecurity that all watchdog resources operating without formal backing face.

Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers
Original: scholarlyoa.com (Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado Denver) · Active 2008–January 15, 2017
Archive: beallslist.net (anonymous European postdoctoral researcher, updating sporadically since 2017)

Creator: Jeffrey Beall · Scholarly Communications Librarian and Associate Professor, University of Colorado Denver · retired 2018 · coined the terms "predatory publishing" and "predatory open-access publishers"

Scale at shutdown: ~923 publishers · ~1,311 standalone journals · grown from 18 publishers in 2011

Key related resources: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, whitelist) · Cabell's Scholarly Analytics (commercial blacklist/whitelist) · Stop Predatory Journals (anonymous archive) · Retraction Watch (post-publication misconduct)