The details have been slightly changed from a real email one of us received, but the tone and subject of the email above are recognisable to scholars and graduate students in nearly every field. Some see these emails as spam – form letters with personal details plugged in perhaps via some type of automatic internet search – and ignore them or ask to be removed from the publishers’ mailing lists. Some simply delete these messages, not recognising the names of the journals as part of their professional networks or relevant to their interests. Others – perhaps less experienced scholars – may be flattered and excited by the invitation. And other scholars, under pressure to publish in English-language international journals for promotion and career security, may see an opportunity to meet their publication quota.

Regardless of how these messages are received, they represent a phenomenon in academic publishing that has exploded in the past decade. Often called ‘predatory open access’ journals (Beall, 2010: 14), these are emerging, open access (OA), online journals and/or publishers whose practices vary from accepted norms of scholarly communication and publishing in a variety of ways. Beall (2010: 15) coined the term ‘predatory’ because, he argues, the mission of these publishers ‘is not to promote, preserve, and make available scholarship; instead, their mission is to exploit the author-pays, Open-Access model for their own profit’. Beall has developed a set of criteria to identify these ‘potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers’. In the years since he began tracking these publishers, Beall’s annual list became a de facto blacklist for scholars wishing to avoid association with sub-par publications.