Scholarly Open Access

By Jeffrey Beall

Released January 2, 2014

The gold (author pays) open-access model has given rise to a great many new online publishers. Many of these publishers are corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts.

There are two lists below. The first includes questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. Each of these publishers has a portfolio that ranges from just a few to hundreds of individual journal titles.

The second list includes individual journals that do not publish under the platform of any publisher — they are essentially standalone, questionable journals.

In both cases, we recommend that researchers, scientists, and academics avoid doing business with these publishers and journals. Scholars should avoid sending article submissions to them, serving on their editorial boards, reviewing papers for them, or advertising in them. Also, tenure and promotion committees should give extra scrutiny to articles published in these journals, for many of them include instances of research misconduct.

There are still many high-quality journals available for scholars to publish in, including many that do not charge author processing fees. An additional option is author self-archiving of article postprints in discipline-specific and institutional repositories.

The author is grateful to the many colleagues who have shared information about potential predatory publishers. Last year’s list included 225 publishers, and this year’s has over 477, evidence of the continued rapid growth in the number of predatory journals and publishers. The table below details the growth of questionable publishers since 2011.

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