For many years now, Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian and associate professor at the University of Colorado, has maintained a WordPress blog of “Potential, possible or probably predatory scholarly open-access journals.” It was a “grey” list of suspicious journals — with a sister list of suspicious-looking “publishers.” (Gosh, I’m using a lot of quotation marks.)

Suddenly, that list, and the archive of stored blogs, has disappeared. Retraction Watch here on WordPress has more information on the closure. There has also been a lot of chatter on Twitter.

The one person we haven’t heard from is Jeffrey Beall. Prof. Beall, wherever you are, we salute you. Beall coined the term “predatory journal” to describe the phenomenon. And it was apt argot, as “fraudulent” isn’t always strictly true or provable, but the journals are clearly not bona fide. These journals prey on unsophisticated authors who need to publish a paper, robbing them of their intellectual property and their money.

Many journals complained about being put on a public list, as some could make a claim to being start-ups. However, something like Beall’s list has to exist. We need to be able to distinguish between the real journals and the predatory ones. At the Council of Science Editors’ meetings, there has been talk of starting the reverse: a “white” list of journals. Journals I know are hurrying to be indexed in the Current Contents/Web of Science indexes that used to be run by Thomson Reuters or in Medline/PubMed. That, at least, is a good-housekeeping seal of approval. But I think we need another black list, so that authors can quickly discover what they’re dealing with.

In the meantime, I have saved the last published version of Beall’s list (available through the Wayback Machine), and I would be happy to check it for you if you contact me via this blog (Contact, above).