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!