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Predatory Publishing
At the time Beall stopped his blog Scholarly Open Access in 

2017, he had been tracking scholarly publishing, the exponen-

tial growth of predatory publishers, and predatory stand-alone 

journals for nearly 10 years. He became immersed in research-

ing this online aspect of deceptive and questionable scholarly 

communication while a faculty librarian at the University of 

Colorado Denver, where he worked as an expert in metadata 

for library discovery systems. Aiming to maintain the integrity 

of the academic record, Beall created a list of suspect scholarly 

publishers and shared it with the public on his blog. Beall’s 

list was free; it exposed various types of deceptive practices, 

corruption of the editorial office and peer review, fraud, and 

hidden publishing fees. With evidence received from duped 

researchers themselves and gathered from the predators’ web-

sites, Beall uncovered how these publishers lured researchers 

into such trappings, which was exacerbated by institutional 

pressures such as the publish-or-perish mindset.

 The path of academic publication became a razor’s edge: 

would authors take the narrow and often hurdled path of 

legitimate scholarly publishing or be lured knowingly or oth-

erwise by predatory journals?

 Beall’s commentaries examined flaws in open access, 

shortcomings of librarianship, and the effects of widespread 

library cancellations of subscription journals. He warned of a 

scholarly publishing industry that failed to regulate itself. As 

predatory publishers grew exponentially, so did the numbers 

of complicit authors who took the fast, easy route to publish 

and pay article processing charges (APCs) to advance their 

own careers. Beall’s critics were not only the predatory pub-

lishers and the authors who published with them but those 

who dismissed the value of his work because he was a critic 

of open access.

 During the 5-year period that Beall ran Scholarly Open 

Access, predatory publishers grew from about 20 in 2011 to 

>1,100 in 2017. The research community was jolted when he 

closed his list, which is still used today in an archived ver-

sion (https://beallslist.net). As of September 2021, Cabells’ 

Simon Linacre reported in the firm’s blog The Source the 

unfortunate accretion of 15,000 predatory journals (a third 

of which are medical titles) and a gray zone of nearly 30,000 

journals (https://blog.cabells.com/2021/09/01/mountain-

to-climb).

 I had the privilege to speak with Jeffrey Beall during a 

Zoom meeting in August of this year and later met up with 

him in Denver in September.

Jeffrey Beall is acclaimed 

for his work in alerting the 

global research community 

to the deep threats posed 

by predatory publishers in 

exploiting the gold open 

access publishing model. 

His work advocated for the 

protection of individual 

authors and the scholarly global community by 

maintaining the integrity of the academic record. He 

coined the terms predatory publisher, hijacked journals, 

predatory conferences, and misleading metrics and 

founded his blog, Scholarly Open Access, in which he 

maintained a list of predatory publishers from 2012 

to 2017. AMWA readers can read his reflection on 

this period1 and track his investigative work exposing 

predatory publishers in his nearly 40 publications on 

the topic since 2008, including interviews, the archived 

version of scholarlyoa.com (https://beallsist.net), and 

YouTube lectures.

Mary Kemper, BS / Medical Writer, Mayfield Clinic, Cincinnati, OH

PRACTICAL MATTERS

The Razor’s Edge of Predatory Publishing 
An Interview with Jeffrey Beall

https://beallsist.net
https://beallslist.net
https://blog.cabells.com/2021/09/01/mountain-to-climb
https://blog.cabells.com/2021/09/01/mountain-to-climb


178    AMWA Journal / V36 N4 / 2021 / amwa.org        

Interview

AMWA: We appreciate your taking the time to speak with 

AMWA and want to acknowledge your work against predatory 

publishing. While you sought to safeguard research integrity, 

you established a foundation for thinking critically about  

this topic. Many of us wonder how you have been since you 

stopped the blog. Tell us about how you are doing now.

Beall: I retired in 2018 from my University of Colorado faculty  

position. I moved to southern Colorado, specifically 

Walsenburg, Colorado, in Huerfano County and the nearby 

Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

 As for tracking predatory publishing, I keep up by read-

ing Google alerts that I receive on the topic. Recently, Paolo 

Crosetto’s blog piece “Is MDPI a predatory publisher?” piqued 

my interest, as I had spent years tracking some of this publish-

er's troubling tactics on my blog.2 I occasionally accept invita-

tions to speak, as I did earlier this year virtually for a university 

in Spain. My invited opinion piece, “Open access, research 

communities, and a defense against predatory journals” was 

published this year in a platinum open access journal for a 

medical society based in Kazakhstan.3

 I’m also digesting several articles analyzing my work.  

It’s both interesting and hard to read a critical analysis of  

one’s work.

AMWA: Readers may be interested your background. Most of 

your work on predatory publishing was done while you were  

a university librarian. What early experiences shaped your 

viewpoint and drew you to library science?

Beall:  I’m from California, earned a bachelor’s degree 

in Spanish, and thereafter served in the Peace Corps in 

Guatemala. After completing a master’s degree in English, I 

went to Saudi Arabia and taught English to employees of the 

Saudi government. Within a year, I wanted a change, so I got 

my master’s degree in library science at the University of North 

Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 After working in the library at Harvard University for 10 

years, I moved back to the west in 2000 to the Auraria Library 

at the University of Colorado Denver. Throughout most of 

my library career, I quietly worked in the library's back room 

researching issues related to library metadata, full-text search-

ing, and information retrieval. The roles of academic librarians 

were taking on increasing importance with the advent of  

scholarly open access publishing.

 My interest in scholarly publishing began in 2005 as a 

Scholarly Initiatives Librarian. In 2008, I began tracking  

spam email invites to publish in what I would later call preda-

tory journals.

AMWA: In your 2012 interview in the Open Access Interviews 

column by independent UK journalist Richard Poynder, you 

describe your metadata work in librarianship and research 

in scholarly communication (https://poynder.blogspot.

com/2012/07/oa-interviews-jeffrey-beall-university.html).  

How were your role and interests changing at that time?

Beall:  As a faculty librarian, I studied bibliographic databases, 

including library catalogs, the effects of typographical errors in 

library databases, and the weaknesses of full text searching. In 

2012, I gained tenure and was promoted to associate professor. 

Academic libraries play an important role in vetting publish-

ers and maintaining online repositories of benefit to authors, 

but they largely failed to warn about the shortcomings of open 

access. Actually, the open access movement inspired many 

libraries to create new open access repositories; I've criticized 

them because they are expensive to operate (licensing fees, 

staff salaries) but are accessed very little. (Print repositories 

of journals have indeed been weeded from libraries, but the 

online counterpart versions offer great added value and have 

been backed up well.) 

AMWA: You came up with the term predatory publisher and 

became an activist for your faculty and the scholarly global 

community. What was that early period like?

Beall:  My first article on the topic, a 2009 review of Bentham 

Open, highlighted how this publisher was exploiting the gold 

open access model with its 200 journals, each with few articles, 

and charging authors high publication fees.3 It was published 

in the Charleston Advisor, a journal that typically publishes 

reviews of electronic databases that librarians license. My 

review alerted libraries to the transgressions of this particu-

lar publisher and to the larger problem of linking to publisher 

sites like these, which flood the scholarly literature with poor 

quality work.

 I understood this was a new concept that needed a name. 

I landed on the term predatory publisher. I knew it wasn’t per-

fect but liked the predatory metaphor and felt the alliteration 

would help make it be easy to remember. I later learned in my 

travels that the term doesn’t always translate well. Although 

others have advocated for a different term, predatory publisher 

caught on. I also coined the terms hijacked journal, predatory 

conference, and misleading metrics.

 The Bentham Open article went largely ignored until late 

2011 when the nursing research community, specifically the 

International Academy of Nursing Editors, took notice. They 

have since conducted extensive research and felt vulnerable, 

realizing that their many specialty nursing fields would be tar-

geted by the predators. Discussion of Beall’s list on this tight-

knit community’s listserve garnered significant attention, and 

interest spread to other research communities.

PRACTICAL MATTERS

https://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/07/oa-interviews-jeffrey-beall-university.html
https://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/07/oa-interviews-jeffrey-beall-university.html


      AMWA Journal / V36 N4 / 2021 / amwa.org    179

AMWA: Your 2012 article in Nature entitled “Predatory pub-

lishers are corrupting open access” 5 was published the same 

year that you launched your blog Scholarly Open Access. You 

exposed their lack of transparency and their dishonesty, the 

effects of a lack of integrity on scholarly literature, the mutable 

nature of their deceit, and the public’s access to bad science.

Beall: This invited opinion piece for Nature, published in 

September 2012, increased attention on this topic and led to 

the term predatory publishing going viral. After that, research-

ers from all over the world began forwarding me spam emails 

they received from newly appearing predatory journals, offer-

ing helpful tips on establishing criteria to evaluate them, and 

revealing their own misfortunes in dealing with these preda-

tors. These examples provided evidence for my blog posts and 

complemented what I uncovered on the websites of predatory 

publishers and stand-alone journals.

AMWA:You issued serious warnings at a time when numbers 

ranged initially from about 20 to later hundreds of predatory 

publishers and stand-alone journals. Tell us about launching 

your blog Scholarly Open Access.

Beall: My first list in 2010 was followed by Scholarly Open Access 

in 2012. I wrote 2 blog posts each week; I enjoy writing and had 

lots to write about in explaining why I listed a particular pub-

lisher. Some of the predatory publishers and journals were so 

clearly fraudulent or silly, and it was fun for me to write with a 

sardonic approach. Nonetheless, the harm was proliferating.

 I noticed the medical research community was hit hard-

est. Predatory publishers targeted grant funds, knowing that 

scholarly authors could use them to cover their APCs. They 

took advantage of the pressure-to-publish culture of medical 

research and appealed to busy clinical researchers, offering a 

fast, easy route to publish.

AMWA: You were bringing a lot of attention to your university. 

What was the response?

Beall:  The university was of 2 minds. It favored the positive 

attention metrics that were garnered through the numerous 

mentions I and the university received on various websites and 

publications.

 However, the dark side of that attention emerged by 2013. 

Predatory publishers on Beall’s list began to lose income. They 

complained, asked to be removed, and began searching the 

University of Colorado’s website to harvest the emails of vari-

ous administrators. In their mass emails, their claims, such 

as that I was a criminal, were initially difficult to deal with. 

However, the university counsel quickly understood the moti-

vation of their baseless accusations.

 My reviews on Scholarly Open Access were comparable to a 

book review. That is, I applied the same skills used in organiz-

ing reviews of books or electronic databases for various pro-

fessional library journals. I was clear that the blog's list and 

reviews were my opinion.

AMWA: Beall’s list included predatory publishers and stand-

alone journals that violated a number of traditional ethical 

norms in scholarly publishing practices. Your work critiqued 

a particular publisher, constructing a foundation about how 

they exploited the gold open access model. How did you come 

up with this strategy, and how did it evolve as the number of 

predators was increasing?

Beall:  Researchers sent evidence, often in a trail of emails, 

after having unknowingly submitted their papers to preda-

tory publishers. Many became suspicious when, the day after 

submission, their article was accepted for publication and 

accompanied by an invoice for the APC. Obviously there had 

been no peer review. Researchers told me all kinds of stories of 

egregious practices by these predators and sent me the solid 

evidence related to transgressions of peer review integrity, edi-

torial standards, business ethics, indexing, and archiving.

AMWA: You wrote twice-weekly blog posts about select pub-

lishers, such as Frontiers or OMICS. You tracked their fake 

addresses to actual locations, found stolen identities, and 

detailed deceptive practices (eg, misleading metrics, claims 

of being included in prestigious scholarly indexes) to lure 

authors. Can you describe your process of investigation and 

writing these commentaries?

Beall:  For each blog post, I had evidence provided by research-

ers or evidence that I encountered myself. I also examined the 

publishers' websites for the number and quality of published 

articles and identified their predatory practices that violated 

scholarly norms. From the start, rather than individual jour-

nals, I focused on publishers, many of which had a fleet of 

journals. Because these publishers would quickly add titles to 

their portfolio to generate income or remove others, tracking 

individual journals would have been impractical and time con-

suming.

 Shortly after the launch of Scholarly Open Access, various 

mentors gave feedback urging me to document the criteria 

used to assess the publishers. As the criteria evolved over  

time, I eventually used 3 versions during the 5-year period of 

scholarlyoa.com.

AMWA: What was noteworthy among the predatory journals 

that targeted medicine?

Beall:  I first noticed the spam emails from library science jour-

nals when I was looking for places to publish. Medical special-

ties, like nursing and ophthalmology, began to monitor activity 

in their fields. Predatory publishers proliferated in medicine, 

PRACTICAL MATTERS



180    AMWA Journal / V36 N4 / 2021 / amwa.org        

often launching one journal per specialty based on a list of 

every specialty taken from a hospital’s department listings. Big 

fleets of predatory journals were exploiting researchers, but 

there were also researchers taking advantage of their fast, easy, 

and often cheap publishing route.

 Medical society journals contribute significantly to keep-

ing societies afloat through a fair subscription price. These fees 

make a little overage that can help cover journal costs and pay 

for other services to benefit residents and students, for exam-

ple. Open access doesn’t work like that: APCs do not generate 

enough income for administrative services, such as managing 

peer review or providing high quality editorial support.

AMWA: Besides providing highly detailed information, you 

framed the rise of predatory publishers in the context of the 

open access social movement and the culture of scholarly pub-

lications. How did your viewpoint about the open access move-

ment evolve?

Beall:  I was always critical of the open access movement. 

Although scholarly open access publishing offers the ben-

efits of being free to read for everyone and of allowing reuse 

and repurpose under the Creative Commons license, it had 

major flaws. From my position as a scholarly communication 

librarian, I argued that advocates for open access lacked fore-

sight about its unintended consequences, such as open access 

threat to science or the pollution of research databases. Their 

promotion continued even after the problems of predatory 

publishing clearly emerged.

 The open access movement attempted to stigmatize and 

shut down traditional scholarly publishers using the subscrip-

tion model to publish high-quality vetted research. These pub-

lications appearing on library platforms also added value to 

research by increasing accessibility to resources and citations.

AMWA: In 2013, criticisms included your review criteria, trans-

parency of your methods for placing a publisher on your lists, 

and other alleged biases found in your blog Scholarly Open 

Access. OMICS threatened to sue. In 2015, some of your pro-

fessional library colleagues cited bias. How did you weigh all 

these criticism and threats?

Beall: Several publishers threatened but never actually sued. 

In 2019, a federal judge ordered the journal publisher and con-

ference organizer OMICS International to pay $50.1 million 

to resolve the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allegations of 

deceptive claims and hidden APCs.6 Although ordered to cease 

operations in the United States, the publisher responded by 

creating many smaller publishing brands, such as Sunkrist, 

to hide the association with OMICS International. Therefore, 

the action by the FTC, though significant, is not having any 

significant impact. For example, when a subsidiary of OMICS 

International acquired society journals, specifically Pulsus in 

Canada and its 2 dozen medical society journals, including 

Cardiology, the journals’ quality declined.

 I discussed the strains of decreased library budgets, journal 

subscription cancellation projects, and the shortcomings of 

my own profession in ignoring the true causes of journal price 

increases to favor the more politically correct advocacy for 

open access.1

AMWA: In 2014, you began a sabbatical at a time when there 

were more than 400 predatory publishers and more than 300 

stand-alone predatory journals. What did you want to accom-

plish during that year?

Beall: During that 6-month period in 2014, I wrote several 

articles and traveled for speaking engagements, including to 

northern Iraq. I enjoyed these engagements, which began in 

2013, and eventually had traveled to dozens of states and 20 

countries.

AMWA: You shut your blog down in 2017 with a listing of 

1,155 publishers and 1,294 journals. You must have faced 

some difficult decisions during that period.

Beall:  It was a very difficult period. Within the first 6 months, I 

wrote “What I learned from predatory publishers,” my account 

about what I learned about scholarly publishing, the pressure 

that researchers face, and the aggressive strategies that some 

predatory publishers used to fight me.1 There was a lot of emo-

tion in this article. One of the main and unique points that I 

made in this commentary was that researchers who publish in 

predatory journals often become their defenders.

AMWA: Since 2017, researchers have tried to update your list 

or create their own unique lists of predatory publishers and/or 

journals for developing countries (http://kscien.org/predatory.

php). In 2017, Cabells Scholarly Analytics launched their sub-

scription products that included their Whitelist and Blacklist 

of 4,000 predatory journals from 18 disciplines that violated 

their behavioral indicators.7 Today Cabells has subscription 

products called Predatory Reports and Scholarly Analytics 

and a team of experts to evaluate an estimated 15,000 preda-

tory journals (a third are medical titles) and 11,000 legitimate 

open access journals, respectively. Another 30,000 journals are 

considered to be in a gray zone. In his 2020 opinion piece “Why 

we should have listened to Jeffrey Beall from the start,” Mike 

Downes says, “Misguided criticism of Beall himself was coun-

terproductive in the fight against fraudulent publishers.”8 

Downes advocates for policy and prosecution of these scam 

open access predators. What’s the future of tracking predators 

and educating authors at a time when many may not have 

access to subscribe to those reports?

PRACTICAL MATTERS

http://kscien.org/predatory.php
http://kscien.org/predatory.php


AMWA Journal / V36 N4 / 2021 / amwa.org    181

Beall:  I’m glad Cabells has taken on this effort. Additionally, the 

business of scholarly publishing hasn’t adequately policed itself 

and needs to establish a credentialing system (eg, like the field of 

pharmacy) to separate bona fide journals and publishers acting 

in good faith from predatory journals and publishers. Before 

open access, libraries played an important role in not subscrib-

ing to junk journals and in preserving scholarly integrity.

AMWA: Through Scholarly Open Access, you connected with 

academics and publishers from all over the world in expos-

ing the high stakes on the razor’s edge of scholarly publishing. 

You identified numerous scams and harms caused by preda-

tory publishers in ethics, finances, and quality, and pursued 

getting these open access scammers out of scholarly databases. 

You warned of the dangers of citation contamination, corrup-

tion of public trust in science, and risks to high-quality medi-

cal journals and research funding. Thank you, Jeffrey Beall, 

for creating an outstanding resource for the academic com-

munity. Your activism is a model for upholding the integrity of 

scholarly publishing, examining the flaws of open access, and 

avoiding the dangerous path of predatory publishing.

Acknowledgment

My appreciation to Barbara C. Good, PhD, and Qing Zhou, 

PhD, for their valuable review.

Author declaration and disclosures: The author notes no commercial 
associations that may pose a conflict of interest in relation to this article.

Author contact: mkemper@mayfieldclinic.com and  
Jeffrey.Beall@ucdenver.edu

References
1. Beall J. What I learned from predatory publishers. Biochem Med 

(Zagreb). 2017;27(2):273-278. https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.029

2. Crosetto P. Is MDPI a predatory publisher? Wordpress website. Published 

April 12, 2021. Accessed November 1, 2021. https://paolocrosetto.

wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publisher/

3. Beall J. Open access, research communities, and a defense against 

predatory journals. Cent Asian J Med Hypothesis Ethics. 2021;2(1):14-17. 

https://doi.org/10.47316/cajmhe.2021.2.1.02

4. Beall J. Bentham Open. Charleston Advisor. 2009;11(1):29-32.

5. Beall J. Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature. 

2012;489(7415):179. https://doi.org/10.1038/489179a

6. Court rules in FTC’s favor against predatory academic publisher OMICS 

Group; imposes $50.1 million judgment against defendants that made 

false claims and hid publishing fees. Federal Trade Commission website. 

Published April 3, 2019. Accessed November 1, 2021. https://www.

ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/04/court-rules-ftcs-favor-

against-predatory-academic-publisher-omics

7. Kemper M. Cabells Scholarly Analytics is a force of knowledge against 

predatory publishing—an interview with Simon Linacre. AMWA J. 

2021;36(1):30-32.

8. Downes M. Why we should have listened to Jeffrey Beall from the start. 

Learn Publ. 2020;33(4):442-448.

PRACTICAL MATTERS

A Career in 
Medical Communication:
Steps to Success
Learn about the skills and attributes needed 
to be a successful medical communicator 
and discover opportunities in the field.

www.amwa.org/career_steps

mailto:mkemper@mayfieldclinic.com
mailto:Jeffrey.Beall@ucdenver.edu
https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.029
https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publisher/
https://doi.org/10.47316/cajmhe.2021.2.1.02
https://doi.org/10.1038/489179a
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/04/court-rules-ftcs-favor-against-predatory-academic-publisher-omics
http://www.amwa.org/career_steps



