more than half a century ago to serve the nation's public health, and its mission now is to pursue fundamental knowledge and apply it "to reduce the burdens of illness and disability". So when employees at the agency have to check their name tag, some soul searching must be taking place. There is no question that the NIH excels in basic research. What researchers such as Schechter are asking is whether it has neglected the mandate to apply that knowledge. Outside

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pam e-mails changed the life of Jeffrey Beall. It was 2008, and Beall, an academic librarian and a researcher at the University of Colorado in Denver, started to notice an increasing flow of messages from new journals soliciting him to submit articles or join their editorial boards. "I immediately became fascinated because most of the e-mails contained numerous grammatical errors, " Beall says. He started browsing the journals' websites, and was soon convinced that many of the journals and their publishers were not quite what they claimed. The names often sounded grand-adjectives such as 'world' , 'global' and 'international' were common-but some sites looked amateurish or gave little information about the organization behind them. Since then, Beall has become a relentless watchdog for what he describes as "potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly openaccess publishers", listing and scrutinizing them on his blog, Scholarly Open Access. Open-access publishers often collect fees from authors to pay for peer review, editing and website maintenance. Beall asserts that the goal of predatory open-access publishers is to exploit this model by charging the fee without providing all the expected publishing services. These publishers, Beall says, typically display "an intention to deceive authors and readers, and a lack of transparency in their operations and processes". Beall says that he regularly receives e-mails from researchers unhappy about their experiences with some open-access journals. Some say that they thought their papers had been poorly peer reviewed or not peer reviewed at all, or that they found themselves listed as members of editorial boards they had not agreed to serve on. Others feel they were not informed clearly, when submitting papers to publishers, that publication would entail a fee-only to face an invoice after the paper had been accepted. According to Beall, whose list now includes more than 300 publishers, collectively issuing thousands of journals, the problem is getting worse. "2012 was basically the year of the predatory publisher; that was when they really exploded, " says Beall. He estimates that such outfits publish 5-10% of all open-access articles. Beall's list and blog are widely read by librarians, researchers and open-access advocates, many of whom applaud his efforts to reveal shady publishing practices-ones that, they The explosion in open-access publishing has fuelled the rise of questionable operators.

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