Beyond Beall’s List: Better understanding predatory publishers

This article discusses the phenomenon of predatory publishing and examines the benefits and limitations of Jeffrey Beall's blacklist of "potential, possible, or probable" predatory open access (OA) publishers. It also describes the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a whitelist of scholarly OA journals, and other tools for evaluating open access journals. It concludes by discussing the role of librarians, who must help researchers avoid low-quality journals and also need to counteract the misconceptions and alarmism that stymie the acceptance of OA.