A blacklist is a curated list of publishers, journals, or websites known or suspected to be untrustworthy or predatory in their practices. These lists aim to warn researchers about entities that exploit the academic publishing process for profit without maintaining proper scholarly standards.
However, blacklists have limitations, as noted by (Swauger 2017):
“Blacklists and whitelists share the same problem in that they attempt to externalize an evaluation process that is best internal, contextual, and iterative.”
This means that while blacklists are helpful starting points, researchers should also rely on their judgment and contextual evaluation when assessing journals.
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is an index of diverse open access journals from around the world. It is managed by an independent, non-profit organisation.
Jeffrey Beall, a former librarian, collated a list of potential and possible predatory scholarly open access journals. However, this list was last updated in 2017. Researchers could refer this archived list to find out if the journal/publisher is blacklisted.
Review of Beall's List:
Cabells offers a paid subscription service 'Predatory Reports' that provides information on over 17,000 predatory journals.
Review of Cabells:
Anderson, R. (2017). Cabell’s New Predatory Journal Blacklist: A Review. In The Scholarly Kitchen.
Silver, A. (2017). Pay-to-view blacklist of predatory journals set to launch. Nature.
Retraction Watch tracks latest news and incidents of predatory publishing, plagiarsim, falsified data and peer-review scandals.
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