Metadata librarian Jeffrey Beall runs the popular industry blog Scholarly Open Access. The site maintains a list of open-access journals and publishers that Beall believes engage in predatory practices. For journals and publishers these acts include things like spamming scholars or charging faulty fees for content. The site is known simply as "Beall's list" to followers and its notoriety has earned Beall ink in places like The New York Times. (And yes, now he even receives pseudo-spammer journals who request to be featured on the site without really understanding.)

Today The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a less amusing letter Beall received Tuesday. An Indian intellectual property management firm called IP Markets informed Beall that they would be suing for $1 billion in damages and that he could face up to three years in prison for his "deliberate attempt to defame our client." That client is OMICS Publishing Group, an India-based operation profiled several times on the blog. The group requested that Beall remove the posts and e-mail updates to anyone who published his work, yet IP Markets still intends to go through with the suit either way.

"All the allegation [sic] that you have mentioned in your blog are nothing more than fantastic figment of your imagination by you," the six-page letter reads according to The Chronicle. "Our client perceive the blog as mindless rattle of a incoherent person and please be assured that our client has taken a very serious note of the language, tone, and tenure adopted by you as well as the criminal acts of putting the same on the Internet."

The Chronicle spoke with one of the IP Markets lawyers who emphasized the potential criminality of Beall's blog under India's Information Technology Act. The particular point of contention, the often debated section 66A, makes it illegal to publish false material or "any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character."

Beall has faced lawsuit threats before and other scholarly publisher bloggers have even gone to court in such situations (see Edwin Mellen Press taking on librarian Rick Anderson). Legal experts talking to The Chronicle seemed skeptical over the validity of this action, and the threatened possibility of jail time, but they did acknowledge a lawsuit in India could be more complicated than if IP Markets had filed within the US. Beall called the amount "silly" and said the case had no merit.