I had one experience with MDPI which shows a lack of sincere interest by the editors to look into possible problems with articles. It’s quite easy to publish pseudoscientific articles in their journals it seems and to get away with it.
This has to do with an article of a special issue of Animals “Combination of Western and Chinese Medicine in Veterinary Science” (http://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/2/3/415 ) It’s on using electroacupuncture in cattle. You could argue that this is pseudoscience anyway, so why bother to look at it at all. I was however intrigued by the fact that the authors had used a device that was supposedly developed by the Soviet Russian Space Program. A Russian reference was given for this, but could not be found anywhere. As I found out this was all made up by a Russian pseudoscientist. Another problem is that the last author of the article is the owner of the firm which sells this device and the first author is member of the scientific advisory committee of this firm, however: “The authors declare no conflict of interest” the article states.
I pointed this out to the editor of Animals and got a reply by an assistant editor. They had looked into it and told me that they had found a reference to this machine. But this was from a German esoteric magazine, which just promotes all kinds of pseudoscientific nonsense. They didn’t report back on the COI issue. Case closed from their side. The firm is happily telling its customers that scientific research has been published on their device :-(
I’ve written a blog on this: http://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/veterinary-acupuncture-and-the-soviet-space-program/ which goes a bit further than just this connection with MDPI.
