Bentham was incorporated in 1994 by Atta-ur-Rahman and his friend Matthew Honan as a private business entity at the Sharjah Airport International Free Trade Zone in the United Arab Emirates.

[5] An investigative profile from Sujag notes the publisher to have operated out of Pakistan — for the first six years, from the premises of International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences and then, from private residential blocks at Karachi — in reality, under the banner of a tax-exempt proxy firm, owned by Rahman's sons.

[8][a] The author, a graduate student at Cornell University, was motivated into the submission after being bombarded with unsolicited invitations to publish in Bentham's journals and offers to serve in their editorial boards for topics beyond his expertise.

[9][11] In 2013, the now-discontinued The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal again accepted a blatantly bogus paper submitted as part of the Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

[18] Beall had since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers".