This site began in 2017 when Jeffrey Beall stopped working on his famous lists of possibly and probably fraudulent (‘predatory’) publishers and standalone journals. It does what Beall was doing, only with improved evaluations and justifications. Most of the journals listed by Beall in 2017 have gone now, but hundreds of others have appeared since and are included here. All entries are regularly updated and kept current to within 3 years of the present. It aims to benefit academics in general but particularly early-career scholars who may be unfamiliar with scam open access publishers. It provides lists of journals that are known to be ‘predatory’ or are suspected of possibly (or probably) being so. Although it continues Jeffrey Beall’s project which is now out of date and has lost most of its practical utility, it is not a ‘new Beall’s list.’ By definition, only Beall himself could provide that. Nonetheless, it could not have been devised and developed without Beall’s seminal influence. The list presented here is simplified, modernised, transparent, and above all justified. Detailed information about the criteria used to assess the (un)ethical standing of the listed publishers can be found on the home page.
There is a sister site, Predatory Publishers, and a base site, Scholarly Outlaws which has comparable lists for conferences and academics (real and fake), besides those for predatory journals and publishers.
University librarians and other relevant officials who provide guidelines and warnings about predatory publishers should consider augmenting their advice in the light of this new resource. Other similar resources include Cabells Predatory Reports, Predatory Journals (predatory journals.org) and KScien (kscien.org). Each has its advantages and disadvantages and I shall write about them all elsewhere. Suffice to say here that Cabells Predatory Reports will cost you a lot of money to access, while the other two named do not include justifications (criteria) for the journals and publishers listed.