Your question perfectly illustrated my point. He left Louisville 25 years ago. The incident remained undisclosed until a couple of months ago, after his public donation to Fang’s website, thanks to the diligence of guys like yiming, who searched the internet deep and wide for dirt. By the way, there is no Louisville in China.
Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jinhai Gao
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jeffrey Beall
What incident? Can you describe it fully?
If he left 25 years ago, how can there be a record on the internet?
Thanks.
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Comment on Beware of Spam Email With Offers to Promote Your Research by Mark Tschudi
I just received an invitation to publish with them, for $3000. Have never heard of this journal and doubt many would see an article in it. So I’ll pass…
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jinhai Gao
First of all, I don’t believe that the incident itself has any bearing on whether MDPI is a legitimate publisher.
The University never made it public. However, in 2002 an anonymous person posted a message (ironically) on a forum in Fang’s website. Yiming was able to dig out this message last month and went after it. You can see a screen shot of that message in yiming’s “33rd open letter to Nature”.
My understanding is that the accusation was from his former advisor from China who claimed that Lin stole his idea in a paper published in the Journal of Organic Chemistry while at the U of L. This accusation was neither proven nor disproved. Partly because of the fallout from this accusation, Lin left Louisville and finished his degree in Switzerland.
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jina
I have just received an SMS message from a MDPI Editor to come to this forum and to defend MDPI.
So, I have just landed in this forum, but I will not speak like an under-control robot, but as a free human being.
I am human. I am scientist and I will speak with the language of TRUTH.
First of all almost all the defenders of MDPI in this forum are editors or authors with multiple papers in MDPI and they do not like to reveal the one and only one truth: MDPI is a Bogus publisher.
Second: MDPI has published many fake papers. Some of them have been reported by previous commentors in this forum.
I have counted more than 10 cases of bogus papers reported here. All well documented with many proofs and much evidence.
Third: If in the internet you can find 10 or 12 bogus papers accepted and published in MDPI, like those that combined genetics, philosophy and astrology in one paper, then we can easily conclude that MDPI probably has accepted and published more than 30 or 40 fake pseudopapers.
These articles and thousand other articles of low quality with made-up statistics (medicine, environment and sociology) is poisson of our academic life.
Stay far from MDPI bogus chinese enterprizes
P.S. I am also victim of the wild and aggressive MDPI spam
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jeffrey Beall
Thank you for this very helpful comment.
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jeffrey Beall
Dear Jinhai: You seem very happy with MDPI, and that’s fine. You are free to like it, and I am free to classify it as questionable. Because you seem to like it so much, I encourage you to publish your research in MDPI’s journals. When you do this, I am sure you will get the academic credit you deserve. –Jeffrey Beall
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Comment on Appeals by Bruce Wolffenbuttel
http://www.sciacademypublisher.com/ appears to be out-of-business now.
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Comment on Iceland Professor in Hot Water for Publishing in Predatory Journals by tekija
Also note that the publication frequency has exploded to 10 papers per year from a few in just two years. Should one look also for (self) plagiarism?
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Albert Noel
Cool down please!
Nothing happened. This journal’s list is not God’s list. The actual quality of a journal can only be determined in two ways:
1. Give the published article to an expert of that area, and seek his comments regarding the article quality.
2. Ask an experienced scientist to send his paper for review to a journal under investigation. That expert can actually judge the quality of desk and actual reviews and comments from the experts.
Other than this, all discussion would be a wastage of time.
Noel
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by DJM
The news story that supposedly backs up what you said about a Nobel Laureate not knowing he was on the editorial board of an MDPI journal should have checked its sources, as you should have too. An e-mail ostensibly sent by Prof Capecchi accepting an honorary appointment to that board exists (I have read i and have no reason to doubt its autheticityt) and a lot of what you state in your reasons to add MDPI to you list comes from the very voluminous (and readily available) targeted e-mail campaign against MDPI since they first indicated support for the Spirit of Science Award. That puts them in good company with Nature who went through something similar for the same reason. A welcome to the world of vociferous lackeys is in order I suppose.
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by J Chen
As Jinhai Gao says: (February 19, 2014 at 11:23 AM)
“a ferocious war against one of the “science cops”, Fang Shimin.”
Just check what the so-called “science cop” did in his own first-authored “scientific publication” , the only first authored publication in his life time. (http://www.jbc.org/content/271/20/11703.ful)
As the figure of western results shows in his paper, the critical results the protein-protein interaction in this paper (also as his PhD. thesis) were combined from 5 different experiments by pasting them together, which is absolutely not acceptable by any scientific standard for conclusion of, or publishing the results. Fang has since no any publishing anymore. He quitted his academic career in USA after 10 years PhD and PostDoc experience and went back to China working as a self-employed “scientific cop” ironically with non-scientific standard. The best example as he recently did in the MDPI issue. He claimed in his web site ” international authority Jeffrey Beall did not list MDPI as a bad publisher” a few days ago when someone in web indicated MDPI showing strange activities in business. But when Jeff put MDPI in questionable publisher list, he then defended MDPI in his web “Mr. Beall is just a librarian and no any organization/authority cares what he said”) .
I would say Fang and Lin have very similar experience in life, both failed in science but good in others. It was said that Mr. Fang receives $500/monthly contribution from MDPI for his “scientific cop foundation” and unknown amount of commercial fee from showing MPDI in his cop web site (www.xys.org). MDPI also contributes thousands dollars of “scientific spirits award” yearly to Fang’s funds, All awards went to Fangs personal friends. Clearly, these funding might be paid as Lin’s protection fee for Lin’s money gathering behaviors.
I support Beall’s activity in clearing the environment of real science.
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Comment on List of Predatory Publishers 2014 by Lachezar Filchev
I submit to MDPI two years ago – and since then I told myself I will not repeat it again. Everything was OK – the journal was brand new, without an IF and of course with the appealing waiver of publicaton fees for the first year of the existence of the journal. My editor was a Chinese (I will not reveal his name unless someone want this), who was very kind and welcoming at the point of acceptance of our paper. We had our paper formally accepted but after we refused to pay 200 Euros for proofread to a company of their choice we were rejected straight away. Of course our work got published where it deserved but ever since I ask myself what is the OpenAccess all about? If it is only about making profits from authors, then it has to be made clear so anyone who want to get into the trap – to get with the conscious that this his/her choice.
P.S. The issue with MDPI is the poisonous mix of quality papers published by them, good looking and sophisticated publication system, and of course luring offers such as publication fee waivers etc., which at the end are just not true.
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by James
MDPI is a bogus publisher. They charge 300 CHF just to fix the format of your paper. This makes the publisher 5 times predatory one. Avoid any relation with MDPI predatory company and the chinese mafia that stands behind, in the dark background. I strongly recommend you to classify the MDPI as Bogus, Predatory and Fake Publisher!
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Comment on Lambert Academic Publishing: A Must to Avoid by Line Fricke
Thanks for this post. I just graduated my Master’s to weeks ago and just received an email from them with a request to publish my thesis. I was suspicious for two reasons
(I) seems a liiiittle to easy to get your work published (you know what they say if it sounds too good to be true it probably is)
(II) I worked close with an organization and my thesis is confidential (how cold someone use it as a reference as LAP claims in their email yo me?).
Research is key and that’s how I came across your blog.
Have a great day!
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by rsignell
We picked MDPI’s Journal of Marine Science and Engineering for the publishing selected papers from the 13th International Conference on Estuarine and Coastal Modeling, and as one of the special issue editors, I’ve been very happy. As editors, we picked the peer reviewers from our community, and the reviews were equal to others I’ve seen as associate editor for the Elsevier journal Ocean Dynamics (and why wouldn’t they be?). The turnaround at the journal has been great (the papers will all be available about 4 months after the conference), which is something we really wanted. If you are interested, check them out here: http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/2/1
The main thing I was concerned about before selecting JMSE was whether the journal articles would still be accesssible in the future if JMSE went belly-up. It turned out that because the JMSE office is nominally in Switzerland, the articles will be stored at the Swiss National Library Archive (and available online via e-Helvetica https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/pages/main.jsf). Seems pretty safe.
One thing in this discussion that really disturbed me was Jeffrey Beall’s response to one of the comments: “You seem very
happy with MDPI, and that’s fine. You are free to like it, and I am
free to classify it as questionable. Because you seem to like it so
much, I encourage you to publish your research in MDPI’s journals.
When you do this, I am sure you will get the academic credit you
deserve.”
As a scientist, I’ve always been uncomfortable with this concept –
that the journal you publish in is the measure of the quality of your
science. What about the actual science contained in the paper?
Shouldn’t each paper stand on it’s own merit, regardless of what
journal it was published in?
I guess it’s likely that Beall’s blog will frighten some folks away
from MDPI, but I don’t really care about that either. If MDPI is gone
in two years, we will use some other open-access publisher!
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jinhai Gao
Jeff, I don’t know how you came up with your conclusion that I am happy with MDPI. I have never published or reviewed a paper in its journals, not on any of its editorial boards. I am not defending MDPI per se. My problem lies with your analysis. In the past I simply accepted your judgment on its face value. However, this time I did look into your analysis in more detail and found it highly problematic. I am here to simply point out these problems.
In my earlier post I pointed out that the picture is incorrect in pointing to a bakery as the publisher’s headquarter. In fact yiming (Xin Ge) corroborated my account by posting the address of MDPI as Klybeckstrasse 64, which is clearly the building next to the red arrow (see the above link. Here is another view: http://s3.t.itc.cn/mblog/pic/20142_20_20/b5hvu953708761605816.jpg). Frankly I am astonished that you ignored my post and continued to show the wrong picture. Of course you are free to classify MDPI as questionable, but you must first get your facts straight. To me this is a credibility issue. The influence of Beall’s list depends on your credibility. I’m not a lawyer, but common sense tells me that by knowingly refusing to correct factual errors, you are exposing yourself to potential liabilities.
Here are my two cents about your sarcastic suggestion on submitting papers to MDPI’s journals. My field is molecular biology. People in this field usually try the best journal you think your paper could be accepted, and if unsuccessful, go down the ladder until you find a journal that accepts your paper. Fortunately I have had no need to publish a paper in a lower tier journal. However, not all papers can get into top tier journals. Lower tier journals exist for a reason. Many problems noted for MDPI journals are not specific for open access journals. There are plenty of traditional journals that publish low quality papers. I have served as a reviewer for some of the lower tier, traditional journals. There is no doubt that standards for these journals are much lower than higher tier journals. I can easily complain about them like people complaining about MDPI journals here. For example, I have noted a dozen pseudoscience papers from a couple of labs published in traditional journals with IF of ~3, which report the effects of a Qigong master’s ability to manipulate the biology of cells.
The bottom line is, when your paper appears in a lower tier journal it doesn’t carry much weight anyways, especially in a US academic institution. There is little difference between publishing it in a MDPI journal versus publishing it in a traditional low quality journal, which by the way is not free either. However, an initially lower tier journal can improve its quality over time if the editorial board is serious. What you are doing to MDPI is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By putting them into your list, you are making it harder for those journals with ambitions to climb the publication ladder to achieve their goals.
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jeffrey Beall
Have you ever published a scholarly paper anywhere? Who are you? I think you were smart not to ever publish in an MDPI journal, and your actions are very telling.
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jeffrey Beall
How much did they charge per paper?
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Comment on Iceland Professor in Hot Water for Publishing in Predatory Journals by Jeffrey Beall
Terry, thanks for this correction. It looks like they changed model. I am seeing a new category of journals like this. Their content is not open-access, and the only way to access them is through ProQuest, if you library happens to have a subscription. Most of the journals are obscure, like these, and few libraries subscribe to them, even in packages. And the articles are not for sale individually on the publisher’s websites either.
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