I am aware a university in Nigeria frowns at Journals emanating from this publisher and thus advises academic staff not to patronize…..
Comment on Global Science Research Journals: A Dangerous Publisher, Keep Clear by Adebayo
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Comment on Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Rivers
Dear Jeffrey Beall,
I am curious. How do they manage to keep decently high impact factor journals? I am thinking on Sensors (IF 2.048, JCR; 1st quartile in Instruments and Instrumentation), for instance.
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Comment on The OMICS Publishing Group’s Empire is Expanding by The Strange World of “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (Part 1) | Nagg
[…] What kind of academic publisher would host an outfit like this? Well, JRDS is published by United Scientific Group (USG[22]), which is on Beall’s List of ‘predatory’ open access publishers[23]. […]
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Comment on Appeals by JanosToth
I just got spammed by http://transconpublishers.org
I visited their website and decided to post them here, they may deserve a spot.
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Comment on Global Science Research Journals: A Dangerous Publisher, Keep Clear by Marco
Regarding IJBRITISH, see:
http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/10/09/ridiculous-oa-journal-launches-with-ridiculous-title/
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Comment on Another Strange New OA Publisher with a Strange Name by Marco
If anyone is interested, I have prepared a document highlighting the plagiarized sections. It would have been much quicker if I had highlighted the non-plagiarized sections, because those amounted to 2 (two !) sentences(!!). The rest is either direct copy-paste, or with very small modifications relating to hyphens, commas and spaces, from other papers (especially Pumera 2011) and press releases.
Jeff, if of interest, send me an e-mail and I will send you the pdf.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by wkdawson
Perhaps different MDPI journals operate differently.
As a guest editor, I did have control of the situation.
They did create a list, but I reviewed it personally and decided who I would permit them to contact. As far as I know, they cooperated with me on that.
I rejected about half the papers that I was responsible for handling, and I reviewed them personally and forced the authors to improve them to meet a minimum standard that I would tolerate for publishable work. In some cases I even worked directly with the reviewers personally to make a finally decision — particularly in one case that I found suspect.
As the person above says, the initial quality of the papers were typically not very high when I first recieved the manuscripts. Nevertheless, of those that I accepted, the papers were significantly improved, clear, and at least had something respectable to say. Perhaps I went out of my way to help some of the authors.
At least for the journal I worked with (Entropy), they have a reviewing system and, as an editor, I can work with the reviewers and the authors. They did assist with finding reviewers, and many of the reviewers they found, I at least have some familiarity with their professional work. The final decision was something I had the authority to make.
The one thing that I found annoying was that several papers took about 6 months of back and forth before I was satisfied. However, in some cases, the final publication listed only the last submission date, not the first and then the date of the last revision. However, when I raised an issue with them, as far as I know, they did respect my complaints on the subsequent submission that I finally accepted.
At any rate, maybe you can blame the general operation of mdpi. However, it is also true that journals are what the people who serve as editors make them. I find it troubling that anyone would accept the __responsibilty__ of an editor and not take take charge of that duty. Whether the journal promises anything or not, is this any more ethical? I certainly don’t think so. Editorship is a privilage, and you should do your job, even if you made promises to such a lowly journal as one within mdpi.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by Storm
It is also important to point out that, after attacking and threatening Jeffrey in many ways, MDPI tried to buy him !!! Of course, he ignored the offer (as it is highlighted in that interview http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-open-access-interviews-publisher.html).
So, it clear that MDPI try anything, from attacking and threatening till trying to buy you. What a Mafia!!!
Unfortunately, it seems that well known associations (like DOAJ and OASPA), have accepted the bribe.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by lorenzoiorio2014
About the Special Issue deadlines, I can tell that, in the case of Galaxies, it was extended once. Then, it was closed, and no more submissions were accepted.
Moreover, after the unjustified and comic “withdrawal” (indeed, it was later put on the internet by a number of independent sources…) of my paper on JASIST about the pseudonyms “Forst” and “Felici” used by Mr. Ciufolini on arXiv to anonymously criticize myself and the GP-B team, I tried to submit an extended version of it to the Special Issue on misconduct of Publications: I was told that the deadline was expired long before.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by wkdawson
Perhaps different MDPI journals operate differently.
As a guest editor with Entropy, I did have control of the situation.
They did create a list, but I reviewed it personally and decided who I would permit them to contact. As far as I know, they cooperated with me on that.
I rejected about half the papers that I was responsible for handling, and I reviewed them personally and forced the authors to improve them to meet the minimum standard that I would tolerate for publishable work. In some cases I even worked directly with the reviewers personally to make a finally decision — particularly in one case that I found suspect.
I do concur, as above, that the quality of the manuscripts I received were typically low and there were a higher fraction of submissions from China (no surprise since they probably advertise in China). Nevertheless, of those manuscripts that I finally accepted, the papers were significantly improved, clear, and at least had something respectable to say. Perhaps I went out of my way to help some of the authors.
The one thing that I found annoying was that some of the papers that took about 6 months of back and forth before I finally accepted the work, listed only the last submission date, not the first and then the date of the last revision. I raised issue about this too, and as far as I know, they did respect my demands on the last submission that I accepted.
I can surely agree that mdpi is not top tier, and I am not all that happy with the way they operate. An editor is also someone in the position to decide what the journal is going to be. Therefore, I find it troubling that anyone would accept the _responsibilty_ of an editor and not take personal responsibility for the production. Whether the journal promises to do everything for the editor or not, isn’t it the duty of an editor to take charge of the situation, or resign if that is impossible? As I say, maybe mdpi varies with the particular journal, but this story is also rather strange.
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Comment on Questionable Subscription Publisher Acts Like a Predatory OA One by D Web
I just received an email from D. Fazel with an invitation to submit to “Medical Research Archives.” Mr. Fazel even went so far as to google me and claim he looked at one of my recent papers, which he listed by title… but has absolutely nothing to do with Medical Research. Indeed I am not in an even remotely bio-related field.
Anyway, thought you would like to know that his email listed two contact numbers, one in Minnesota like you have already noted, but another with the country code +48 which I believe is Poland.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by Storm
useless??? There are a lot of evidence and examples in this contribution, which corroborate with previous facts about this predatory publisher. Plus “the statement was endorsed by interviews with other guest editors involved in recent special issues.”
So, how could someone deny all these facts from different sources collected along the years?
Of course, there may be some exceptions … but the questionable machinery behind MDPI is quite clear. Only fools would ignore that.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by D Web
Interesting about the keyword search that coughs up author emails… I wonder if they wrote a script that reads article titles and auto-inserts them into emails? Because that would be a super sneaky way to make it seem as if you were sending a personal invitation. I’m guessing this because it happened to me today, I received an invitation to submit to a journal, and the invitation quoted the title of one of my papers, but my field is not even remotely related to the journal’s topic.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by lorenzoiorio2014
Frankly speaking, I did not and do not care anything if publisher X allegedly behave badly with a journal y outside my field of expertise: I only look at what X does with the journal(s) I am interested in. About them, first of all I look at the quality of the Editorial Board, the page layout, etc.etc. And in all these cases MDPI has been fine so far. All the rest is utterly useless.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by Sylvain B.
“But why Web of Science also does not kick out these journals which are based in all kinds of questionable actions???”
mmmhh… Perhaps because many journals indexed by Thomson Reuters are also involved in such questionable actions??? If too many journals are fired, the web of Science will be forced to shut down.
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Comment on Questionable Subscription Publisher Acts Like a Predatory OA One by nick
I did!! Thanks for the suggestion!
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Comment on Red Alert: Polish Scholarly Journal is Hijacked by Tuğba
What a bad luck it is !!! I hope they accept our withdraw.. well, If they don’t send me any feedback, can i submit it to different journal?
In your previous comment you indicated that we must tell the history of paper.. But isn’t it a bad reputation? If necessary we can tell abaout the history or show our e-mail (including wihdrawing)..
Thank you for your leading :)
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Comment on Red Alert: Polish Scholarly Journal is Hijacked by Jeffrey Beall
To protect yourself, I think it’s a good idea to be completely open and honest about a paper’s history when you withdraw it from one journal and submit it to a new one.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by wkdawson
I think mdpi has a manuscript management system for all their journals; at least it appeared to be so. Entropy certainly had one. They did try to find peer reviewers, and many of them I know professionally. They certainly asked me for a decision based on the reviews — and sometimes we had spent some time on it too. So again, what “the author” says is largely inconsistent with my experience there.
About 1/4 of the reviewers were actually very good, and 1/2 of them were at least ok. I can say that because I read all the manuscripts that I passed and rejected myself. So I spent far more than 30 min on each of them. This is maybe another issue that journals like this can suffer from. They end up with people who submit at least respectable work and they also get some very questionable stuff. So it takes quite some work to sort out the people submitting the work and it is better to make sure.
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Comment on Guest Editing a Special Issue with MDPI: Evidences of Questionable Actions by the Publisher by MK
The problem is that bad reputation of the publisher is infectious and affect to the authors.
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