In a bid to remove predatory publishers from its list, the Directory of Open Access Journals is requiring journals on its rolls to re-apply under a more stringent application process, Nature News reports.
When the DOAJ was first established in 2003, it had 300 journals, but that number has since bloomed to nearly 10,000 journals, some of which are scammers or don't live up to the expected peer-review or archiving standards, Nature News notes.
"We all know there has been a lot of fuss about questionable publishers," says Lars Bjørnshauge, the founder of DOAJ.
Under this new application process, the journals must provide information regarding its archiving policy, editorial board, content licensing, and more.
Jeffrey Beall at the University of Colorado Denver, who runs a blacklist of predatory published, questions whether such a whitelist will work
"There's no evidence that the whitelist approach has been helpful in encouraging researchers not to become victims of scams," he tells Nature News. "Bad open-access publishers are still growing like crazy."