Serials Review

ISSN: 0098-7913 (Print) 1879-095X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usrv20

Beall’s List and Cabell’s Blacklist: A Comparison of

Two Lists of Predatory OA Journals

Xiaotian Chen

To cite this article: Xiaotian Chen (2019): Beall’s List and Cabell’s Blacklist: A Comparison of Two
Lists of Predatory OA Journals, Serials Review, DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2019.1694810

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2019.1694810

Published online: 02 Dec 2019.

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SERIALS REVIEW
https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2019.1694810

ARTICLE

Beall’s List and Cabell’s Blacklist: A Comparison of Two Lists of Predatory

OA Journals
Xiaotian Chen
Cullom-Davis Library, Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This study uses systematic random sampling to compare the content of “Beall’s List of Beall’s List; Cabell’s blacklist;
Predatory Journals and Publishers” and “Cabell’s Blacklist” of journals. The Beall’s List data Open Access
was generated from its new site that maintains a new list besides the original list. It found predatory journals
that 28.5% Beall’s List sample publishers are out of business, some Cabell’s Blacklist journals
have become ceased. The main takeaway is that among the Beall’s List sample publishers
with a working website for journal publishing, only 31.8% can be found on Cabell’s Blacklist.

Introduction
“Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers” was
created in 2010 by Jeffrey Beall, scholarly communica-
tions librarian at the University of Colorado at
Denver (Beall, 2013). Beall himself said his list was
created in 2010 (Beall, 2013), but some literature
reported that the list was created in 2008
(Straumsheim, 2017). The original list was shut down
on December 31, 2016, and in 2017 it was moved to a
new site (https://beallslist.weebly.com/) and has been
maintained by an anonymous person since 2017. The
new Beall’s List site has two parts: Beall’s original list
and a new list added below the original list by Beall’s
successor. The December 2016 shutdown became
international news in scholarly communication and
journal publishing. Basken (2017) summarized the
possible major causes as the following:
 Frontiers Media, a well-financed Swiss open access
(OA) publisher, angry about being listed;
 Beall’s university under pressure from vari-
ous parties;
 OA proponents.
Not long after the original Beall’s List was shut
down, Cabell’s, which traditionally publishes journal
directories, announced that its new product Cabell’s
Blacklist became available for subscription. This study
compares the content and the methodology of Beall’s
List and Cabell’s Blacklist. Non-gold-OA predatory
publishing is not the focus of this study. Since both
lists are on the same subject, one of the two lists is
more well-known, more controversial, easier to access
(free on the Internet), and the other is less known
and behind the paywall, this study aims to compare
these two lists. The comparison may help answer
these questions:
 Is the content of the two lists similar?
 How much/what is the difference, if the content of
the two lists is different?
 Why is there the difference, if the content of the
two lists is different?
 What are the criteria used by the two lists? What
are the pros and cons of the two lists?
 What are the implications to authors and readers, if
people cannot agree which journals are predatory?

Basken offered some details and discussions on this

Literature review
story in his Chronicle of Higher Education article
“Why Beall’s List died—and what it left unresolved The terms “predatory publisher” and “predatory pub-
about open access.” lishing” were coined by Beall, and he has never tried

CONTACT Xiaotian Chen chen@bradley.edu Bradley University, 1501 W Bradley Ave, Peoria, Illinois, USA.
Chen was listed among “Top 20 Librarian Authors Worldwide” in “Worldwide contributors to the literature of library and information science: top authors,
2007–2012,” Scientometrics (2015) 103:301–327.
ß 2019 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 CHEN
to shy away from expressing his negative view on the
gold OA publishing model (Beall, 2013). In his article
“Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences
of gold open access” published in Learned Publishing,
Beall said that the weaknesses of gold OA include
threatening the existence of scholarly societies and
increasing in author misconduct. Therefore, he thinks
that “The gold OA model is an unsustainable failure”
(Beall, 2013). In 2012, Beall gave a fairly lengthy def-
inition of predatory publishers as “those that unpro-
fessionally exploit the gold open-access model for
their own profit. These publishers use deception to
appear legitimate, entrapping researchers into submit-
ting their work and then charging them to publish it.
Some prey especially on junior faculty and graduate
students, bombarding them with spam e-mail solicita-
tions. Harvesting data from legitimate publishers’
websites, they send personalized spam, enticing
researchers by praising their earlier works and inviting
them to submit a new manuscript. Many of these
bogus publishers falsely claim to enforce stringent
peer review, but it appears they routinely publish art-
icle manuscripts upon receipt of the author fee. Some
have added names to their editorial boards without
first getting permission from the scientists they list,
among other unethical practices” (Beall, 2012).
Berger and Cirasella (2015) are among the authors
who had a neutral position on Beall’s List. They had a
comprehensive discussion on predatory publishers,
Beall’s List, its criticisms, and librarians’ roles. They
pointed out that predatory publishing is not unique to
OA journals, even though OA is the focus of Beall’s
List. Straumsheim (2017) reported the shutdown of
Beall’s List in a neutral tone. He mentioned that
“Beall populated the lists based on 52 criteria he
developed.” He also reported that Cabell’s had worked
with Beall on developing a journal blacklist since 2015
and that Cabell’s Blacklist was slated to launch in
spring 2017. Kolata (2013) appeared to be neutral but
did focus on “the dark side of open access” in her
New York Times article. Anderson (2017) is also basic-
ally neutral in his comment on Beall’s List. He
thought “Beall’s List was brave and valuable, but sig-
nificantly flawed.” He questioned Beall’s objectivity
since Beall is against the OA movement. He also
believed that even with its flaws, the shutdown left a
significant hole in the scholarly communica-
tions ecosystem.
Crawford (2014) is among the authors who
criticized Beall’s List. He offered detailed criticisms of
Beall’s negative view on OA. Crawford’s points
include: Beall blamed peer-review failure of traditional
journals on the new OA model; Beall’s List counted
on one-man authority, his own authority, to
judge and jury, and some of his criteria are question-
able; Beall underestimated the serials crisis libraries
face by declaring that the serials crisis was over; Beall
declared that the OA movement is not about OA
but rather about anti-corporatism. On the same
side with Crawford, Esposito (2015) accused Beall
of “characterizing a group by its most
extreme elements.”
Mimouni et al. (2017) defended Beall’s List and
believed that “the scientific community should benefit
from a regularly updated list of open access predatory
journals.” They pointed out that “OMICS Publishing
Group prominently appeared on Beall’s list. In 2013
the US National Institute of Health stopped listing
OMICS publications in PubMed Central and
requested that this publisher stop making false claims
of US government affiliation.” They also said that
“refraining from addressing the emergence of pseudo
journals publishing pseudo-science may slowly erode
the legitimacy of well-conducted science.” Watson
(2017) too defended Beall’s List by calling it a
“valuable service.” He also pointed out that while
Beall’s List served as a blacklist for OA journals,
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) serves as a
whitelist of OA journals. Ferris and Winker (2017)
discussed ethical issues in publishing in predatory
journals. They advocated that it is important for
researchers to “avoid supporting predatory journals by
not publishing in them, serving as their editors or on
the editorial boards, or permitting faculty to know-
ingly publish in them without consequences.” Laine
and Winker (2017) wrote a guideline “Identifying
predatory or pseudo-journals” for World Association
of Medical Editors (WAME). They included Beall’s
criteria for identifying predatory journals and publish-
ers, DOAJ’s criteria for receipt of the DOAJ Seal, a
checklist, a list of warning signs, and a figure of
predatory journals algorithm. Beall’s criteria accounted
for a significant part of the entire WAME guideline.
Sorokowski et al. (2017) reported their 2015 experi-
ment on predatory journals. They created a profile of
a fictitious scientist named Anna O. Szust and applied
on her behalf to the editorial boards of 360 journals.
Oszust is the Polish word for “a fraud.” The 360 jour-
nals were from three groups, with 120 in each one of
the groups: Beall’s List, DOAJ, and Journal Citation
Report (JCR). The result tells an astonishing contrast
on who embraced “fraud” among journals in the three
groups: 33% Beall’s List samples accepted “fraud” to

their editorial board, 7% DOAJ samples accepted it,
and 0% JCR journals did that.
Bohannon (2013) reported that during
January–August 2013 he submitted fake articles to 304
OA journals, with one article per journal. Of the 304
journals, 167 were from the DOAJ, 121 from Beall’s
List, and 16 that were listed by both. 82% samples
from Beall’s List accepted the fake article, while 45%
DOAJ samples accepted it. Only 98 journals rejected
the fake articles, and 49 gave no response to
Bohannon possibly because the OA journals were no
longer in business. Bohannon’s experiment was con-
ducted in 2013. In 2016, DOAJ raised its standard. All
DOAJ journals had to re-apply for their inclusion in
DOAJ with the new standard, and DOAJ dropped
3,300 journals that did not submit valid reapplication,
roughly 30% of the total DOAJ journals at that time
(Baker, 2016).
McCool (2017) reported that he received invitation
to write for Urology & Nephrology Open Access
Journal published by MedCrave Group, even though
he is not in the field of medicine. He went ahead and
wrote a totally made-up Seinfeld-themed case report
about a man who developed uromycitisis poisoning,
which was based on the 23rd episode of the situation
comedy Seinfeld aired in 1991 in the United States.
He used Dr. Martin van Nostrand, a Seinfeld charac-
ter, as the author’s name, made an email account for
Dr. van Nostrand, and created a fake author affiliation
called Arthur Vandelay Urological Research Institute.
His made-up article was accepted for publication,
pending some minor changes and a USD $799 fee.
Studying predatory journals based on their call-
for-paper emails collected by himself and his col-
leagues, Petristor (2016) also listed some examples of
OA journals accepting bogus articles. Petristor pointed
out various common features of predatory OA jour-
nals. One feature is fake location: a journal can give
people an impression that it is located in Country A
either with Country A in journal title or in address,
but most or all its operation is in Country B.
Anderson (2017) offered detailed reviews of
Cabell’s Blacklist, listing its strengths and weaknesses.
He believed the strengths of Cabell’s Blacklist include:
 clearly set out and publicly available criteria;
 date of review included; linking to appeal policy;
 ratings at journal level instead of publisher’s level;
 specific violations listed.
Anderson thought the most serious issue of
Cabell’s Blacklist is that it mixes low quality with
SERIALS REVIEW 3
deceptive or predatory publishing, and he also listed
several less serious problems.
Methodology
The data collection and the comparison of Beall’s List
and Cabell’s Blacklist were conducted in January 2019.
Beall’s List is a simple alphabetical list by publisher. It
appears to be regularly appended by Beall’s anonym-
ous successor, as on January 16, 2019, the website was
marked “Last updated January 14, 2019.” Beall’s List
included 1,217 publishers in alphabetical order, with
1,163 listed on the original list and 54 added by
January 14, 2019 by Beall’s successor. In addition to
the 1,189 publishers, Beall’s List also had 1,395 single,
standalone journals with or without known publishers,
in alphabetical order. Instead of by publisher, Cabell’s
Blacklist is by journal. It is not really a “list,” but
rather a searchable but not browsable database. It
included 10,498 journals in January 2019. Even
though it is not possible to browse all the journals, its
homepage had this on top of the page “10,498 results
were found” on January 16, 2019, and listed the first
20 journals in alphabetical order. A “Load More” but-
ton at the bottom of the first 20 journals allows users
to see more journals. Each click on “Load More” but-
ton loads another 20 journals. In addition to a simple
search box, Cabell’s Blacklist also offers an advanced
search option that users can search by key word,
country, ISSN, and publisher. All search results are
one or more journals, if there is a search result.
Cabell’s Blacklist homepage also has a link to a
Microsoft (MS) Excel file, with publishers and jour-
nals under review. On January 16, 2019, the Excel
file’s publishers sheet listed 955 publishers and jour-
nals sheet listed 1,128 journals. Since the future of
these under-reviewed publishers and journals is
unknown on Cabell’s Blacklist, this study did not take
them into consideration when comparing the
two blacklists.
On January 16, 2019, the author of this paper con-
verted Beall’s List of 1,217 publishers (1,163 from the
original Beall’s List and 54 from the appended list by
Beall’s successor) in alphabetical order into an Excel
file, and then used systematic random sampling
method to select 10% random samples of publishers
on Beall’s List. The 1st, 11th, 21st, 31st … … rows
were selected. A total of 123 sample publishers (117
from the original list and 6 from the appended list)
were selected. One sample publisher GSB Life
Sciences is now part of Omics, probably the largest
and most well-known publisher being accused of
4 CHEN
being predatory, so Omics replaced GSB Life Sciences
as a sample publisher in this study. The 123 sample
publishers’ websites were visited, and if a website was
still working, the number of journals published by the
publisher was recorded. The sample publishers were
searched on Cabell’s Blacklist advanced search by pub-
lisher. If a publisher search resulted in one or more
journals of the publisher, the number of journals was
recorded. As a result, publisher’s data in the Excel file
includes whether the publisher’s website is still work-
ing, whether the publisher can be found on Cabell’s
Blacklist, the number of journals by the publisher on
Cabell’s Blacklist, and the number of journals listed
on publisher’s website.
The scope of this study is OA predatory publishing.
Beall’s List clearly states on the criteria page at https://
beallslist.weebly.com/uploads/3/0/9/5/30958339/crite-
ria-2015.pdf that the list is on OA publishers. Cabell’s
Blacklist, on the other hand, does not say whether the
list includes any non-gold-OA journals. This study
assumes that most (if not all) journals on Cabell’s
Blacklist are OA journals, and predatory non-gold-OA
publishing is not the focus of the study.
There are various limitations in this study. One is
the differences between how the two lists are organ-
ized (by publisher vs. by journal title), how the lists
are focused (specifically on OA vs. not specially stated
if all journals are OA or not), and access to the lists
themselves (Beall’s List complete, browseable and
open vs. Cabell’s Blacklist searchable but not brows-
able and behind a paywall). Another is that the sam-
ples were obtained from Beall’s List to search against
Cabell’s List but not the reverse, because Cabell’s
Blacklist can only be searched but the full list of the
journals from Cabell’s List cannot be downloaded
for studying.
The findings
First of all, as of January 2019, 35 (28.5%) of the 123
sample publishers on Beall’s List were out of business,
including one sample that was added to the list in
2017 or later by Beall’s successor. The websites of
these 35 publishers were either dead or became a site
not related to scholarly journals. For example, the site
(http://eruditejournals.org/) of Erudite Journals
Limited became a cooking and health tips/help site,
and the site (http://iaaet.org/) of International
Association of Advances in Engineering and
Technology has an “iaaet.org domain is for sale” sign.
Synotec Publishers is among the 54 new publishers
added by Beall’s successor and its website now has a
“The domain name has expired” sign. That appears to
be a fairly high out-of-business rate among the pub-
lishers listed by Beall and his successor.
For the remaining 88 sample publishers with a
working journal publishing website on Beall’s List, the
author then searched them on Cabell’s Blacklist and
also visited their websites to record the number of
journals listed on each publisher’s site. Because a pub-
lisher’s name may have a variant on Beall’s List,
various attempts were made to double-check or triple-
check whether a publisher indeed has journals on
Cabell’s Blacklist or not. If a publisher cannot be
found on Cabell’s Blacklist by the publisher’s regular
name and if it has an alternative name or an abbrevi-
ated name on Beall’s List, these names were also
searched. If still nothing was found, the author would
identify the first journal listed on the publisher’s web-
site and search that journal on Cabell’s List. Twenty-
eight (31.8%) sample publishers from Beall’s List were
found to have journals on Cabell’s Blacklist and 60
(68.2%) sample publishers could not be found, with
the message “No journals matched your
search criteria.”
Because Cabell’s Blacklist requires a subscription,
this paper does not publish the full list 28 sample
publishers whose journals are on Cabell’s Blacklist.
However, the following is the full list of Beall List’s 60
sample publishers whose journals could not be found
on Cabell’s Blacklist in January 2019. The publishers’
names were copied as is, including any notes from
Beall’s List. All the 60 publishers had a working web-
site as of January 2019. The 60 publishers are listed at
the Appendix A of this article.
For the 28 sample publishers that are on both
Beall’s List and Cabell’s Blacklist, the journals listed
on publisher’s websites are mostly the same as those
listed on Cabell’s Blacklist. In other words, Cabell’s
Blacklist usually includes almost all journals listed on
their publisher’s websites, as long as the publisher is
on Cabell’s List. This indicates that it does not make
much difference to list by publisher (as Beall’s) or list
by journal (as Cabell’s). Table 1 is the breakdown for
the 28 publishers that are on both lists.
 Fourteen (50%) publishers have identical number
of journals on both their websites and Cabell’s
Blacklist, or, 50% publishers have all their journals
listed by Cabell’s Blacklist. One of the fourteen,
BioInfo Publications, lists five active journals and
has another 128 ceased journals in a separate list,
while Cabell’s Blacklist has the total of 133 journals
under BioInfo Publications without indicating the
Table 1. Beall’s List publishers found on Cabell’s: numbers of journals on Cabell’s and publishers’ websites.
Journals listed on Discrepancy between
Publishers listed by Beall’s Journals listed by Cabell’s publisher website Cabell’s and publisher site Note
1088 Email Press 7 7 0
Academic Research in Science, Engineering, Art and Management (ARSEAM) 15 9 6 6 listed by Cabell’s no longer on
ARSEAM site
Academic Solutions 3 3 0
AD Publications 3 3 0
American Journal 3 3 0
Associated Asia Research Foundation (AARF) 9 8 1
BioInfo Publications 133 133 0 Publisher site lists 5 active and 128
ceased journals.
Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering & Sciences Publication 10 9 1
BRNSS Publication Hub 5 7 2
Didactic Journals 44 44 0
Eighth Sense Research Group (part of Seventh Sense Research Group Journals) 30 28 2
Engineering Research Publication 2 2 0
Euro Asia Research and Development Association 5 4 1
GBS Publishers & Distributors (India) 41 42 1
Global Journals, Inc. (US) 6 3 3
Imperial Journals 14 14 0
International Journal of College and University (IJCU) 3 3 0
International Scientific Academy of Engineering & Technology 3 4 1
Invention Journals 5 5 0
Meghana Publications 10 8 2
Omics 772 700 72 Some Omics partner publishers are
listed as Omics by Cabell’s. Thus
Cabell’s lists more than
Omics website.
Paper Publications 8 8 0
Pinnacle Journal Publication 16 16 0
Sanford Inter Science Press 7 ? ? Site requires login
ScholArena 16 76 60
ScholarsHub.net 3 3 0
Swedish Scientific Publications (journal titles begin with SSP Journal) 8 9 1
ZolCat Academic House 2 2 0
SERIALS REVIEW
5
6 CHEN
ceased. This category would have 13 publishers if
BioInfo Publications is not counted.
 Ten (35.7%) publishers have 1–3 journal
discrepancies between their websites and
Cabell’s Blacklist.
 Three (10.8%) publishers have 4 or more
discrepancies between their websites and
Cabell’s Blacklist.
 One (3.5%) publisher’s data are incomplete because
publisher site requires login.
The data in Table 1 and above bullet list suggest
that even though Beall’s List is by publisher and
Cabell’s Backlist is by journal, all or almost all jour-
nals from a certain publisher are included in Cabell’s
Blacklist, as long as the publisher is on Cabell’s
Blacklist. The above data also tells us that similar to
Beall’s List that includes some publishers are out of
business, Cabell’s List includes some journals that are
no longer active, as in the case of 128 ceased journals
by BioInfo Publications.
After finding that as much as 68.2% Beall’s List sam-
ples are not on Cabell’s Blacklist, the author wanted to
know if journals of these unique Beall’s List samples are
included in DOAJ. The significantly high percentage of
unique publishers on Beall’s List was a surprise to the
author and bringing in DOAJ was not included in the
original research design. DOAJ is generally considered
as a whitelist of OA journals, since journals on DOAJ
went through some selection criteria/rules. The author
was curious whether the journals by of these unique
samples from Beall’s List are in DOAJ as “good” jour-
nals. In January 2019, there were over 12,000 journals in
DOAJ. The first journal listed for these 60 sample pub-
lishers was searched on DOAJ, and not a single journal
was found in DOAJ. Because this study searched Beall’s
List samples on Cabell’s Blacklist, and cannot do the
other way (searching Cabell’s samples on Beall’s), only
the journals by the unique publisher samples from
Beall’s List were searched on DOAJ.
The criteria and merits of the two lists
Beall’s List is a free site anyone can view at its current
home at https://beallslist.weebly.com/, and it primarily
lists publishers in alphabetical order. Cabell’s Blacklist,
on the other hand, is a subscription-based resource. It
cannot be browsed and can only be searched, and the
search result is one or more journals, or a message
“No journals matched your search criteria.”
Anderson’s (2017) comprehensive review of Cabell’s
Blacklist offers a lot of information for anyone
interested in Cabell’s Blacklist and the author of this
paper would not repeat all the Cabell’s features
Anderson has documented.
In January 2019, Cabell’s Blacklist included 10,498
journals, while Beall’s list had 1,217 publishers plus
1,395 single or standalone journals with or without
known publishers. Because one of the two blacklists
primarily makes the list by journals and the other pri-
marily by publishers, it is may not be easy to tell
which list covers more journals by a certain percent-
age or specific quantity.
Beall’s List treats all the journals by the same pub-
lisher the same since it makes the list by publisher,
while Cabell’s List offers reasons why a certain journal
is listed by having a certain number of violations. Not
all the journals from the same publisher have the
same number of violations. For example, among 772
Omics journals listed on Cabell’s Blacklist, the number
of violations ranges from four to ten. There are both
pros and cons for the two different approaches. For
small publishers that publish only a few journals, it
probably does not make much difference whether
the list is by publisher or by journal. For Beall’s one-
person operation, it is certainly more manageable to
maintain a list by publisher. On the other hand,
although it takes more time and effort to maintain the
list by journal, Cabell’s Blacklist is fairer to journals
by publishers of dozens or hundreds of journals, since
different people handling the different journals may
have different approaches. Cabell’s posts its blacklist
criteria to a publicly available page at https://www2.
cabells.com/blacklist-criteria. On the individual jour-
nal record of Cabell’s Blacklist, it clearly specifies why
the journal is listed. Users can see the number of vio-
lations, what the violations are, Cabell’s review date,
journal’s launch date and country of origin, and
appeal policy for publishers. Here are examples of vio-
lations of one journal on Cabell’s Blacklist:
 “Integrity: The publisher hides or obscures rela-
tionships with for-profit partner companies. The
journal is associated with a conference that has
been identified as predatory.
 Indexing & Metrics: The journal uses misleading
metrics (i.e., metrics with the words “impact
factor” that are not the Thomson Reuters
Impact Factor).
 Fees: Surprise fees.
 Peer Review: Have board members who are prom-
inent researchers but exempt them from any con-
tribution to the journal except the use of their
names and/or photographs.

 Publication Practices: The publisher displays prom-
inent statements that promise rapid publication
and/or unusually quick peer review (less than
4 weeks).
 Business Practices: Emails from journals received
by researchers who are clearly not in the field the
journal covers. Multiple emails received from a
journal in a short amount of time.”
Although Beall’s List also has a detailed selection
criteria listed at https://beallslist.weebly.com/uploads/
3/0/9/5/30958339/criteria-2015.pdf, its publisher list is
a plain list, with no information for each publisher,
such as when it was put on the list and what the pub-
lisher’s specific violations are. With no specific rea-
sons for each individual publisher as to why it is
listed by Beall and his successor, Beall’s List is less
convincing than Cabell’s Blacklist. But since Beall’s
List was a one-person operation, it is simpler and
more cost-effective to list by publisher, and the free
list is more accessible than subscription-based
Cabell’s Blacklist.
Conclusions
Since 2017, there are two lists of predatory journals:
the new site of Beall’s List and Cabell’s Blacklist, with
the former being free and the later subscription-based.
This study used systematic random sampling to com-
pare the coverage between Beall’s List and Cabell’s
Blacklist as of January 2019. It found that 28.5% sam-
ple publishers on Beall’s List are out of online journal
publishing business and some journals on Cabell’s
Blacklist have become ceased journals, and that the
two blacklists do not have a significant overlap. Only
31.8% sample publishers from Beall’s List were found
to have journals on Cabell’s Blacklist, 68.2% sample
publishers from Beall’s List could not be found on
Cabell’s Blacklist, and no sample journals from the
68.2% unique Beall’s List sample publishers were
found in DOAJ, a whitelist of OA journals. Cabell’s
Blacklist is probably more conservative or careful, and
Beall’s List may be more inclusive or aggressive.
The biggest takeaway or surprise is that the vast
majority (68.2%) of Beall’s List sample publishers with
a working website are not found on Cabell’s Blacklist.
The author believes that the controversial and com-
plex nature of the so-called predatory publishing may
have played a major role in why there is so much dif-
ference between the two lists. In other words, the con-
siderable difference in the content of the Beall’s List
and Cabell’s Blacklist may reflect the reality that it is
not easy for people to agree which OA journals are
SERIALS REVIEW 7
predatory. Given the reality that no lists can be ideal
and Cabell’s Blacklist also requires subscription, inex-
perienced authors might want to take multiple
approaches to avoid predatory journals. Besides black-
lists, authors could also use whitelists and traditional
journal indexes. The website “Think. Check. Submit”
at https://thinkchecksubmit.org/ could be helpful too.
It is a cross-industry initiative led by ALPSP,
DOAJ, INASP, ISSN, LIBER, OASPA, STM, UKSG,
and publishers.
ORCID
Xiaotian Chen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5785-8986
References
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Baker, M. (2016). Open-access index delists thousands of
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8 CHEN

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Our totally bogus case report swiftly passed muster, with  The Grant Medical Journals (GMJ)
only minor revisions requested. The Scientist. Retrieved  Explore International Research Journals
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No/49071/title/Opinion–Why-I-Published-in-a-Predatory-  Informatics Journals
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543 (7646), 481–483. doi:10.1038/543481a  Kamla Raj Enterprises (KRE Publishers)
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ics.” Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.inside-  Noto-are
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nals: RIP. Nursing Open, 4(2), 60. Retrieved from doi:10.  Pezzottaite Journals
1002/nop2.78  Priyanka Research Journal Publication
 Public Science Framework
 Research Foundation for Humanity (RFH)
Appendix A  Research, Science, and Technology Publishers (RST)
 RS Publication
Beall’s List includes 60 sample publishers whose journals
 Science & Knowledge Publishing Corporation Limited
could not be found on Cabell’s Blacklist in January 2019.
 Science Publications (www.thescipub.com) this one is
The publishers’ names were copied as is, including any
dead but other Science Publications alive
notes from Beall’s List. All the 60 publishers had a working
 Science Signpost Publishing Inc. (SSPub)
website as of January 2019. The list is in alphabetical order
 Scient Open Access
in two groups, with the last four publishers in a new group
 Scientific Institute For Advanced Training and
added by Beall’s successor.
Studies (SIATS)
 Scientific Research Gate
 Academic and Business Research Institute  SciRes Literature
 Academy of Science and Engineering (ASE)  SJournals
 AIRCC Publishing Corporation  Society for Science and Nature
 Amoghsiddhi Education Society (AES) (AES Journals in  The Standard International Journals
Engineering Technology, Management, and Sciences;  Thomson & Ryberg Publications
AES E-JOURNALS) also here  United Scholars Publications
 Aradhya International Publication  Uptodate Research Publication
 Asia Pacific Institute of Advanced Research  Virtual Foundation for Advancement of Science and
 Aufau Periodicals (AP) Technology (VFAST)
 Avanti Publishers.com  WFL Publisher
 Bentham Open  World Academic Union
 Canadian Science and Research Group (CANSRG)  Copernicus Publishing
 Center for the Development and Dissemination  Innovision Health Media, Inc.
of Knowledge  Modern Business Press
 Dr. BGR Publications  SAE Publications (Scientific and Academica Editores
 ExcelingTech Publishing Company, Ltd. Publication house, SAEP)
 Friends Science Publishers (FSP)