Open Educational Resources (OER)

What are Predatory Publishers and Vanity Presses?

Not all academic journal and book publishers are created equal. The definition of predatory publishing has evolved considerably over time, but the core criteria are that they deceptively present themselves as scholarly and that they seek to benefit from not following standard peer-review and quality control processes. One type of predatory publisher is a "vanity press," which requires the author to pay and does not provide the normal services that a traditional publisher would.

Faculty and graduate students may receive seemingly harmless emails from publishers soliciting contributions, but many of these are actually predatory publishers. Some predatory publishers could even claim to use a peer-review process, but in reality they are just scam. Other publishers may in fact be well-known, but also have a reputation for accepting virtually everything regardless of scholarly merit.

Publishing with a predatory publisher can harm your reputation in the field (colleagues looking at your CV will wonder why you did not review the publisher's/journal's credentials), and it results in a waste of your hard work because your research most likely will not be properly peer-reviewed and published in a source that other scholars will take seriously.

At the Spring Forward 2025 librarian conference, an academic librarian named Karen Burton, based at Clemson University, shared her experience and a number of resources she developed. Here are some of the resources that numerous faculty have found extremely useful: 

Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers

Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian and library scientist, originally coined the term "predatory open access publishing" to draw attention to abuses that publishers may practice, such as requiring payment from the author in order to publish. Read more here about Beall's development of this concept.

Beall has compiled several highly respected lists of potentially predatory publishers and "vanity presses" that scholars should be aware of. It is better for a scholar's reputation to avoid publishers that are shown to use predatory practices, as these flaws contaminate the objectivity and quality of the works therein. These concepts, and the need for continued dialogue on the reputations of these presses, are explained by Beall on the following pages: