On Blacklists and Whitelists | The Scientist Magazine®

"... Anderson and others advocate for the use of 'whitelists' in addition to or in place of blacklists. Even before Beall’s list came online, for example, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provided researchers with a freely available list of open-access publishers that the organization had vetted in a process outlined on its website, which is widely considered the most comprehensive compendium of open-access journals deemed reputable. 'Blacklists are very, very difficult to provide and require a lot of curation—you have to be careful,' says Lars Bjørnshauge, managing director of DOAJ. For one, inadvertently including a nonsuspect journal could unnecessarily harm a publisher’s reputation. And, at least in theory, it’s more feasible to objectively evaluate journals based on what they do, rather than what they do not."