The removal of a website flagging up journals with questionable publishing practices will help these publications operate thanks to a reduced scrutiny of their behaviour, researchers have told Times Higher Education. ?

The closure is a ¡°substantial loss¡± to the scholarly community, said one academic, while another added that it will now be harder to spot some predatory journals with professional-looking websites.

Jeffrey Beall is an associate professor and librarian at the University of Colorado Denver. Since 2008 he has listed ¡°potential, possible or probably¡± predatory publishers on his website scholarlyoa.com.

The list was controversial, with some publishers threatening legal action and others complaining of a lack of transparency on his decisions. But it had become the go-to resource for researchers to check on the status of unfamiliar journals they were considering for publication of their work.

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It is not yet clear why the content has been removed. Professor Beall declined to comment when approached by 91ÇÑ×Ó, but a spokeswoman for the university said he will now be pursuing new areas of research.

The spokeswoman added that the institution ¡°supports and recognises¡± the importance of his work in the area of scholarly publishing and ¡°understands and respects¡± his personal decision to take down the website.

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Sarah Ward, associate professor of plant genetics at the Colorado State University and director of publications at the Weed Science Society of America, said the removal of the list was ¡°a substantial loss¡±.

¡°The lists themselves were invaluable as a reference when checking out an unfamiliar journal or publisher, and Jeffrey's blog posts were often very informative for those of us who are not professional academic librarians,¡± she added.

The removal of the list will ¡°make it easier¡± for predatory publishers to operate, she said.

¡°The most worrying aspects of losing Beall's list and blog is not so much the exposure of the really low-grade operators, but that the claims to scholarly legitimacy of larger and better funded unscrupulous publishers are less likely to be scrutinised,¡± she added.

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Timothy Rich, assistant professor in the political science department at Western Kentucky University, agreed that shady operators would benefit from reduced scrutiny. ¡°It is incumbent on academics to point out these publishers, to name and shame these publishers, and to discourage non-academics from using these sources as legitimate research,¡± he said.

But he pointed out that there are some academics willing to pay to publish in predatory journals to boost their publication count. ¡°The list served to identify such behaviour,¡± he said.

He added that the website had provided a ¡°great service¡± and that he hoped someone else will pick up where Beall left off. But in the meantime ¡°it will be harder for academics to identify predatory publishers that maintain professional websites with titles that pass cursory inspection¡±.

holly.else@tesglobal.com