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.
