The shift to open access created an honest funding model, where a publication fee replaces a subscription, and a dishonest imitation of it. Predatory publishers exploit the article-processing-charge model by collecting fees while providing little or none of the editorial scrutiny, peer review and preservation that the charge is supposed to pay for. The danger is not only wasted money; it is good work buried in venues that lend it no credibility, and a literature diluted by material that was never properly reviewed. For researchers, and especially for those early in their careers or working in under-resourced systems where predatory outlets target aggressively, the practical skill is knowing how to tell a trustworthy journal from a convincing fake.
Think. Check. Submit.
The most widely recommended starting point is Think. Check. Submit., a cross-industry initiative supported by a coalition of scholarly-communication organisations. Rather than maintaining a list of bad actors, it gives researchers a checklist to assess a journal for themselves before submitting. The questions are deliberately practical: Do you or your colleagues know the journal? Can you easily identify and contact the publisher? Is the journal clear about the peer-review process it uses? Are the editorial board members identifiable and genuinely affiliated as claimed? Is the journal indexed in services you recognise, and is it transparent about any fees? Are the articles preserved in a recognised digital archive? The strength of the approach is that it builds judgement rather than dependence on a list, and the questions translate across disciplines and countries.
DOAJ inclusion criteria
For open-access journals specifically, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) functions as a trusted whitelist. DOAJ is a curated directory that only admits journals meeting a substantial set of criteria covering editorial quality, transparency and good publishing practice. A journal must demonstrate genuine peer review, clear editorial policies, openness about fees, proper licensing, and a range of other markers of legitimacy before it is accepted. Inclusion in DOAJ is therefore a meaningful positive signal: it does not guarantee that every article is excellent, but it indicates that the journal has been vetted against recognised standards. The presence of the DOAJ Seal marks journals that meet an even higher bar of best practice. Checking whether an open-access journal is in DOAJ is one of the single most useful steps a researcher can take.
COPE membership
A third positive signal is membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Member journals and publishers commit to COPE’s standards for handling ethical issues, from authorship disputes to allegations of misconduct, and have access to its guidance and processes. While membership is not a guarantee of perfection, a journal’s willingness to subscribe to recognised ethical norms, and to be accountable to them, is a marker that legitimate venues tend to display and predatory ones tend to lack. Together, indexing in a selective service such as DOAJ, identifiable and properly affiliated editors, transparent peer-review and fee policies, and COPE membership form a converging picture of trustworthiness.
The trouble with blacklists
It is tempting to want the opposite of DOAJ: a definitive list of journals to avoid. The history of that idea is cautionary. Beall’s list, compiled by the librarian Jeffrey Beall, was for years the best-known catalogue of journals and publishers he judged to be predatory. It raised awareness of the problem and was widely consulted, but it attracted serious criticism on several grounds:
- It was largely the judgement of one individual, applying criteria that some found opaque or inconsistently applied.
- Inclusion could unfairly damage legitimate journals, particularly smaller titles and those from the Global South, raising concerns that the criteria carried a bias against newer or non-Western publishing models.
- There was little due process for a journal to contest or correct its inclusion.
- The list was eventually taken down by its author, leaving those who had relied on it without a maintained resource and illustrating the fragility of depending on a single curator.
The episode crystallised a broader lesson. Blacklists are reactive, hard to maintain fairly, and prone to false positives that harm exactly the resource-constrained researchers most vulnerable to predatory targeting in the first place. The field has consequently shifted towards curated allow-lists such as DOAJ, transparent and reproducible criteria, and education that equips researchers to evaluate venues themselves, rather than denylists that ask them to trust a single arbiter.
A practical routine
The pragmatic conclusion for any author choosing where to submit is to combine these tools into a short routine. Work through the Think. Check. Submit. questions; confirm an open-access journal’s presence in DOAJ and look for the Seal; check for COPE membership and an identifiable, genuinely affiliated editorial board; and be wary of unsolicited invitations, vague peer-review claims and pressure to pay quickly. This positive, evidence-based approach protects the researcher far better than any blacklist, and it advances knowledge equity by helping researchers everywhere, regardless of how well-resourced their institution, distinguish genuine venues from predatory ones. Choosing a trustworthy venue is also the foundation on which other good practices, from clear contributor attribution through frameworks like CRediT to the reuse goals of FAIR data, ultimately rest.
