World’s main list of science ‘predators’ vanishes with no warning

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From The Ottawa Citizen:

In 2012, a librarian from the University of Colorado presented research in a field so new he had to name it himself: predatory publishing.

Jeffrey Beall discovered thousands of online science journals that were either willing to publish fake research for cash, or just so inept that they couldn’t tell the good from the bad and published it all.

Beall, who became an assistant professor, drew up a list of the known and suspected bad apples, known simply as Beall’s List. Since 2012, this list has been world’s main source of information on journals that publish conspiracy theories and incompetent research, making them appear real.

But on Sunday, his website went blank. Only the headline, Scholarly Open Access, remains.

Beall is a regular on Twitter, but he hasn’t posted anything there in days. He isn’t answering email (including a message from the Citizen) or telling anyone what happened. Beall’s List had just been updated for 2017.

A Texas firm called Cabell’s, which also works with academic publishers, hinted that Beall was threatened somehow.

Its Twitter account said on Tuesday: “@CabellsPublish stands behind close personal friend @Jeffrey_Beall who was forced to shut down blog due to threats & politics #academicmafia.”

. . . .

In his 2017 update, Beall had identified 1,155 suspicious or fake publishers, most of them putting out dozens or even hundreds of online journals.

Link to the rest at The Ottawa Citizen and thanks to Joshua for the tip.