Cabells' Predatory Reports criteria: Assessment and proposed revisions

Abstract

Cabell Publishing Co. (herein Cabells), a private Texas-based US company, filled a void left after the shutdown of Jeffrey Beall's blacklists or watchlists that categorized open access “predatory publishing”. In addition to a journal whitelist or safelist product, Journalytics, Cabells markets a product (Predatory Reports) for post-secondary institutions that lists journals' infractions and poor practices, and thus acts as a warning system for academics to determine if they might be dealing with a scholarly entity, or not. Predatory Reports consists of three levels of criteria, or “infractions” (severe, moderate, and minor), that correspond to eight categories. In this paper, we critically examined the Predatory Reports' 74 criteria to determine which of them are clear and useful, and which might be ambiguous or not entirely meaningful. We identified seven criteria that could be accepted as they are, 28 criteria that required clarification and revision, and 39 criteria that we believe should be eliminated. Our expectation is that once this and additional publishing-related criteria have been fully and carefully assessed, validated and parsed, that a community-based set of criteria will eventually become established to better guide academics about safe or risky publishing venues.