kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beall's_List-1.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Beall's List	2/3	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beall's_List	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T10:14:49.561109+00:00	kb-cron

==== "Dr Fraud" experiment ==== In 2015, four researchers created a fictitious sub-par scientist named Anna O. Szust (oszust is Polish for "fraud"), and applied on her behalf for an editor position to 360 scholarly journals. Szust's qualifications were dismal for the role of an editor; she had never published a single article and had no editorial experience. The books and book chapters listed on her CV were made-up, as were the publishing houses that allegedly published the books. One-third of the journals to which Szust applied were sampled from Beall's List. Forty of these predatory journals accepted Szust as editor without any background vetting and often within days or even hours. By comparison, she received minimal to no positive response from the "control" journals which "must meet certain standards of quality, including ethical publishing practices." Among journals sampled from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), 8 of 120 accepted Szust. The DOAJ has since removed some of the affected journals in a 2016 purge. None of the 120 sampled journals listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) offered Szust the position. The results of the experiment were published in Nature in March 2017, and widely presented in the press.

=== Criticism === The list's 82% accuracy rate in the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting operation led Phil Davis to state that "Beall is falsely accusing nearly one in five as being a 'potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publisher' on appearances alone." He wrote that Beall "should reconsider listing publishers on his 'predatory' list until he has evidence of wrongdoing. Being mislabeled as a 'potential, possible, or probable predatory publisher' by circumstantial evidence alone is like the sheriff of a Wild West town throwing a cowboy into jail just 'cuz he's a little funny lookin.' Civility requires due process." Joseph Esposito wrote in The Scholarly Kitchen that he had been following some of Beall's work with "growing unease", and that Beall's "broader critique (really an assault) of Gold OA and those who advocate it" had "crossed the line". City University of New York librarians Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella wrote that his views were biased against open-access journals from less economically developed countries. Berger and Cirasella argued that "imperfect English or a predominantly non-Western editorial board does not make a journal predatory". They stated that "the criteria he uses for his list are an excellent starting point for thinking about the hallmarks of predatory publishers and journals", and suggested that "given the fuzziness between low-quality and predatory publishers, whitelisting, or listing publishers and journals that have been vetted and verified as satisfying certain standards, may be a better solution than blacklisting." However, for researchers in developing countries, the list has also been described as having been particularly important, as a result of lower access to institutional support for guidance on predatory publishers. Rick Anderson, associate dean in the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, challenged the term "predatory open access publishing" itself: "what do we mean when we say 'predatory,' and is that term even still useful?... This question has become relevant because of that common refrain heard among Beall's critics: that he only examines one kind of predation—the kind that naturally crops up in the context of author-pays OA." Anderson suggested that the term "predatory" be retired in the context of scholarly publishing: "It's a nice, attention-grabbing word, but I'm not sure it's helpfully descriptive... it generates more heat than light." In its place, he proposed the term "deceptive publishing". Beall's List primarily assessed the predatory journals based on their compliance with procedural standards, even though the quality of a journal can be judged on at least six different dimensions. A 2020 review in BMC Medicine found that only 3% of "predatory checklists" found online met their study's criteria for being "evidence-based"; Beall's List was not amongst them. A 2021 study in The Journal of Academic Librarianship confirmed Beall's bias against OA journals.

== Removal == On January 15, 2017, the entire content of Beall's Scholarly Open Access website was removed, along with Beall's faculty page on the University of Colorado's website. The removal was first noticed on social media, with speculation on whether the removal was due to migration of the list to the stewardship of Cabell's International. The company later denied any relationship, and its vice president of business development declared that Beall "was forced to shut down blog due to threats and politics". The University of Colorado declared that the decision to take down the list was a personal decision from Beall. Beall later wrote that he had taken down his blog because of pressure from the University of Colorado, which threatened his job security. Beall's supervisor, Shea Swauger, wrote that the university had supported Beall's work and had not threatened his academic freedom. A demand by Frontiers Media to open a research misconduct case against Beall, to which the University of Colorado acquiesced, is reported as the immediate reason for Beall to take down the list. The university's investigation was closed with no findings. In an interview in 2018, Beall stated that "my university began to attack me in several ways. They launched a research misconduct investigation against me (after seven months, the result of the investigation was that no misconduct had occurred). They also put an unqualified, mendacious supervisor over me, and he constantly attacked and harassed me. I decided I could no longer safely publish the list with my university threatening me in these ways." Beall has not reactivated the list.

== Successors ==