Cabells' Predatory Reports is a paid subscription service provided by

Cabell Publishing Cabells is a scholarly analytics company based in Beaumont, Texas. Established in 1978 by management professor David Cabell, it originally maintained only a directory of verified business academic journals. Since then, it has grown to include Jou ...

featuring a database of deceptive and

predatory journal Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misle ...

s, and Journalytics is a database of "verified, reputable journals", with details about those journals' acceptance rates and invited article percentages. In June 2020, Cabells changed the name of its previous Whitelist and Blacklist to Journalytics and Predatory Reports, respectively. Cabells describes Predatory Reports as "the only database of deceptive and predatory academic journals." Some freely available alternatives exist.

Subscription

Unlike Beall's List, which went offline permanently in early 2017, Predatory Reports is available on a subscription basis. Specifically, it is available either as a standalone product or as an "add-on" at a discounted rate to subscribers to at least one discipline in Journalytics. The company originally considered offering its list for free. It then decided that the cost of building and maintaining it was too high for a free service.

Criteria

Cabells has produced two transparent criteria versions
v1.0
an
v1.1
Cabells' v1.0 contains 64 criteria, which are organised by subject matter such as “integrity”, “peer review”, and “publication practices”. This v1.0 evaluation list was used for the preparation of the deceptive journal list before it was launched until early 2019, when Cabells launched its new v1.1 criteria version. This v1.1 evaluation checklist features 74 behavioural indicators, which are grouped “according to relative severity and subject matter”. Some of the criteria used by Cabells to tag journals as predatory have been criticized, including, for instance, the indicator “no policies for digital preservation" whose interpretation varies according to subjectivity.

Reception

Cabell's list has been criticized for including numerous empty journals, which "raises serious questions about the ways in which they prioritise journals for inclusion and their willingness to provide an up-to-date and useful blacklist to the scholarly community". Other concerns include "questionable weighing and reviewing methods" and "a lack of rigour in how Cabell applies its own procedures" as "identical criteria are recorded multiple times in individual journal entries" and "discrepancies exist between reviewing dates and the criteria version used and recorded by Cabell". Journals on Predatory Reports are not re-assessed by Cabells and as such the entries can rapidly become outdated.

Jeffrey Beall Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the o ...

has argued that deceptive journal lists are useful to researchers who want to know where to publish, adding that he thinks Cabell's appeals process will be one of the most challenging aspects to manage.

Aalto University Aalto University (; ) is a public university, public research university located in Espoo, Finland. It was established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities: the Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economic ...

economist Natalia Zinovyeva told ''

Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...

'' that it will be "extremely valuable" to help academic committees evaluate researchers' CVs. Rick Anderson, the former president of the

Society for Scholarly Publishing The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is a professional society, founded in 1978, dedicated to promoting and advancing communication and networking among all sectors of the scholarly communications community. It has approximately 1,100 membe ...

, wrote: "Overall, I find the Cabell’s Blacklist product to be a carefully crafted, honestly managed, and highly useful tool for libraries, faculty committees, and authors."

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://www2.cabells.com/about-predatory Internet properties established in 2017 Blacklisting Bibliographic databases and indexes

Subscription

Criteria

Reception

Further reading

See also

References

External links