Article in the New York Times covers “the dark side of open access,” detailing the effort of academics to identify and combat pseudo-science publications and those journals with less-than-rigorous standards for article submissions.
The sources cited are informative and useful for academics for avoiding scam publications and bogus conference offers. Jeffrey Beall’s website maintains a list of individual journals that have made his blacklist and the criteria in which he uses to identify these journals. Also, the special issue of Nature covering “The Future of Publishing” featuring articles “The dark side of publishing” and “Sham journals scam authors” among others.
There’s a great post at Gavia Libraria from last year about how to detect scammy journals and also an article in the latest Library Journal by Karen Coyle that offers a useful critique of Beall’s list.
An update from the Chronicle of Higher Education about one publisher that has threatened to sue Jeffrey Beall over his list of academic journals that are questionable according to the criteria his site defines.
http://chronicle.com/article/Publisher-Threatens-to-Sue/139243/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en