Trust in science is under more pressure than it has been in a long time. Paper mills, hijacked journals, citation rings and a flood of machine-written manuscripts mean that “is this a real journal?” is now a question every reader, reviewer, funder and university has to ask. And the tools for answering it have not kept up.
The traditional answer is a deny list. Something like the old Beall’s List: a roster of predatory journals, so you can filter them out of a search, an evaluation, a systematic review. We understand the appeal. Nobody wants to cite a paper mill by accident.
But we’re not building a deny list, and we don’t think you want one either. Librarians have been making this case for a decade: deny lists are opaque, they go stale the moment they’re published, they’re a lawsuit magnet, and they land hardest on exactly the journals that can least absorb the hit… small, new, non-English, Global South. Beall’s List went dark in 2017. The advice since then has been consistent: don’t filter out the bad, filter in the good. Use allow lists.
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In the era of the legacy indexes, “approved” meant one thing: is it in the index? That made a kind of sense when a couple of companies ran the only lists. It makes less sense now, because different questions need different lists.
We launched in September with twenty-two, and we keep adding more: there are 61 now. The first twenty-two:
Since then we’ve added national research-evaluation lists from Russia (the White List), Poland, Flanders (VABB-SHW), Italy (ANVUR), Türkiye (TR Dizin), South Africa (DHET), Korea (KCI), Spain (the FECYT quality seal), Argentina (Núcleo Básico) and Colombia (Publindex); the FT50, UTD24 and FNEGE business-school lists; the China Computer Federation’s journal list (CCF); and China’s Dongbi Index.
