Resource of the Week #103: An Aid for Identifying Questionable Journals

Hello again. Welcome to this week’s resource post.

Maybe you have had the following experience (or will have it): An unfamiliar journal invites you to submit a paper. The journal is open access. Thus, authors pay publication fees, and readers can access the articles for free.

You wonder: Is this journal a high-quality publication? Or, for example, does it publish articles without obtaining peer review? Might it take authors’ money and never publish their papers?

Sometimes one can answer such questions by looking at the journal or asking colleagues or mentors. And our current Resource of the Week can help in this regard.

This resource, called Beall’s List, lists “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”. In other words, it lists publishers and journals that seem likely to be taking authors’ money without providing the promised service.

This list is the work of academic librarian Jeffrey Beall. The list is associated with Beall’s blog, which is titled Scholarly Open Access.

Sources of further information on Beall’s work include a recent interview in a blog associated with the Chronicle of Higher Education and a recent article in the journal Nature.

Until the next post—

Barbara