We invite scientists, who consider an article published by MDPI to be problematic, to submit their findings and position directly to the Editorial Office of the concerned journal (in this case: entropy@mdpi.com). We will review the feedback and share it with both the authors and editors of the journal. We treat all feedback with utmost respect, and suggestions for improvement are always welcome.
MDPI performs a standardized (single) blind peer-review process on all articles. The peer-review is organized by our in-house staff under the supervision of an academic editor (usually the Editor-in-Chief of a journal). We solely rely on senior scholars for peer-reviewing the manuscripts submitted to MDPI journals. We have appropriate controls in place to avoid any publication of manuscripts without acceptance by reviewers and the academic editors. The final decision to publish a paper is taken by our Guest Editors and Editors-in-Chief, which have no financial or material incentive to either reject or accept papers, other than the desire to progress science. The review article mentioned within this blog was submitted to MDPI as part of a Special Issue for Entropy in January 2013, and was published in April 2013 after the completion of our standard process. The Special Issue was titled “Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality”. It should be noted here that this is a review paper, and not an original article.
We reject the comment added to this post suggesting the “journal uses the pyramid-like scheme of hiring guest editors”, as this insinuates we are hiring guest editor to exploit others. Guest Editors work for MDPI on an honorary basis to progress scholarly research in their field of expertise. MDPI does not pay guest editors, and relies on the goodwill and support of the community.
We would like to add: if all scholars were concerned with publishing “non-controversial” and “conformant” research, we would miss out on much discourse and, in some cases, progress. We are aware that there are many opinions out there, and the Internet provides a forum for anyone to voice their opinion (in contrast to the peer-reviewed article). You refer to three other ‘controversial’ articles published by MDPI: not all the 25’000 articles published by us in the last 17 years have come under scrutiny, however we are always open to feedback, and would like to reiterate that readers can always reach out to us via our website with their concerns.
