Suspect Academic Journals

On my wanderings across the internet I came across Jeffrey Beall’s fantastic site Scholarly Open Access.  His site is a fantastic resource for suspected academic journals and the publishers that produce them.  The journals that are listed are nothing more than cash cows for catching unwary researchers by charging them to publish their own articles in journals that are not properly edited or peer-reviewed.  This is often a trap that PhD and Post-Doctoral students can fall into as they aim to publish their research to gain academic credit and traction to start an academic career.  However it is well noted that established academic researchers and lecturers often collude, willingly or unwillingly and sometimes unknowingly, by serving as editors on the journal boards.  Ben Goldacre, in his 2012 book ‘Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients‘, mentions the damage that this can do to scientific research and to human health.  It is a serious problem in the academic world that has real world effects in the application of scientific research and results.  The criteria by which Beall determines predatory open access publishers can be found here and the full list of potential, possible or predatory scholarly open access journals and publishers themselves can be accessed here.