Trust in science is under more pressure than it has been in a long time. Paper mills, hijacked journals, citation rings and a flood of machine-written manuscripts mean that “is this a real journal?” is now a question every reader, reviewer, funder and university has to ask. And the tools for answering it have not kept up.
The traditional answer is a deny list. Something like the old Beall’s List: a roster of predatory journals, so you can filter them out of a search, an evaluation, a systematic review. We understand the appeal. Nobody wants to cite a paper mill by accident.
But we’re not building a deny list, and we don’t think you want one either. Librarians have been making this case for a decade: deny lists are opaque, they go stale the moment they’re published, they’re a lawsuit magnet, and they land hardest on exactly the journals that can least absorb the hit… small, new, non-English, Global South. Beall’s List went dark in 2017. The advice since then has been consistent: don’t filter out the bad, filter in the good. Use allow lists.
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In the era of the legacy indexes, “approved” meant one thing: is it in the index? That made a kind of sense when a couple of companies ran the only lists. It makes less sense now, because different questions need different lists.
We launched in September with twenty-two, and we keep adding more: there are 61 now. The first twenty-two:
Since then we’ve added national research-evaluation lists from Russia (the White List), Poland, Flanders (VABB-SHW), Italy (ANVUR), Türkiye (TR Dizin), South Africa (DHET), Korea (KCI), Spain (the FECYT quality seal), Argentina (Núcleo Básico) and Colombia (Publindex); the FT50, UTD24 and FNEGE business-school lists; the China Computer Federation’s journal list (CCF); and China’s Dongbi Index.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
