https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/18/librarians-list-predatory-journals-reportedly-removed-due-threats-and-politics Full Title: No More 'Beall's List': Librarian removes controversial list of "predatory" journals and publishers, reportedly in response to "threats and politics." This is unfortunate. While some have pointed out that it is safer to provide a list of 'good journals', Beall provided a real service as there are many naïve researchers who have lost substantial work and money to this very lucrative brand of fraud.
This site http://tinyurl.com/zzhpvhp lists four archive.org locations where it can still be found, although this may well change, too. With many respectable traditional juried journals charging authors very high per-page fees to publish their articles, it seems to me that the dividing line between 'predatory' and non-predatory journals grows murkier.
The add to the insult to injury, the Open" or free journal movement has been co-opted by the very journals whom the open journal movement wanted to get away from.
I've frequented his blog for a while, and kind of feel that he jumped a shark lately. He clearly has a bias against the whole Open Access movement rather than the predators. In particular, I believe his case against MDPI and "Frontiers in..." publishers were rather weak; they appear to be a lower-tier for profit efforts, but not predators. Facts he reports look more like botched cases of attempting to run peer review process rather than sham peer review bogus outfits run. Nevertheless, it was an important and influential voice in the whole publishing debate.
I was also sorry to see Jeff Beal get threatened into taking down his site. While it was not perfect, it was the best reference of its kind out there. I get regular solicitations from journals, some of which are on Beall's lists. There are so many legitimate peer-reviewed journals that do not charge publication fees to authors that I do not even consider publishing with those that do. When our doctoral students deliver papers at professional conferences, they will often get unsolicited invites from predatory publishers, so I went to the archive sites and created PDF copies of the lists for them.
The Chronicle has an article on the University of California cancelling their package subscription from the corporate giant Elsevier Publishing. One can't subscribe to the journal one's institution needs, it's the whole Elsevier lineup or nothing, and the UC's had been paying $50 million for access for five years. https://www.chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-System/245798
