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Open Educational Resources (OER)

Also referred to as Open Access Resources. This guide is intended as an central access point for liaisons to verify and update open access resources and to provide ready resources to map to subject or class guides.

Should I publish here decision tools

About Predatory or Disreputable Journals

Predatory or Disreputable Journals

Predatory or disreputable journals can be defined as journals that "do not follow best publication practices."  For example:

  • Peer review may be poor or non-existent.
  • Editorial board membership information may be incorrect.  (People may be listed there without their knowledge.)
  • Information about publishing costs or article processing charges may be misleading.
  • Journals might not be indexed in scholarly literature databases such as PubMed, PsycInfo, Web of Science, or CINAHL.
  • Websites might refer to non-standard impact factors or misrepresent where articles are indexed.
  • The content might not be digitally preserved.

A Note About PubMed

  • If you want to publish in a journal that is fully indexed in PubMed, search for the title in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) catalog. 
  • Look for the phrase "Currently indexed for MEDLINE" in the journal description.
  • Even if there are a few articles from a particular journal in PubMed, that doesn't mean that it's fully indexed in PubMed.  Some articles are available in PubMed (unindexed) because they were deposited in PubMed Central to meet NIH public access policy requirements and not because they were published in a journal that the National Library of Medicine chose to index.

Beall's List and Other Lists of "Predatory Publishers"

We recommend using the strategies above (or contacting a librarian) to evaluate a journal or publisher.

There have been attempts to create lists of publishers to avoid - including what was known as Beall's list (now defunct.)  If you use one of the following lists, please keep in mind that publishers might change their policies and that evaluators of publishers might have biases.

  • An archived copy (last updated December 2016) of the defunct Beall's list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers is available.
  • Another archived copy of the defunct Beall's list has been preserved and updated (last updated December 2021) by an anonymous postdoctoral scholar.

Information courtesy of the University of Washington research guide referenced below.