On Predatory Publishers: a Q&A With Jeffrey Beall

Use the link to access the interview introduces as follows: “If your incoming flow of email spam looks anything like mine, it probably features a regular invitation to submit an article to a journal you have never heard of, or to be a part of its editorial board, or maybe even to edit the journal.  The names of the publishers vary, but the invitations usually look something like this one, which arrived last week... ‘I am very pleasure that you can read this letter. Given the achievement you made in your research field, we sincerely invite you to join the Editorial Board for the Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology (ABB). We are looking for Editorial Board members and Editor-in-Chief with renewal options.’ And if you attempt to find out more, very soon you will find yourself looking at Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers, a sardonic, highly informative guide to a particular sort of publishing scam.  The author of the list is Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado at Denver, and the man behind the Scholarly Open Access blog.  He graciously agreed to explain the scam to me.”