MDPI journals

r/

Hi everyone, I’m new to this subreddit, so apologies if this has already been discussed.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on MDPI journals, particularly those with decent impact factors and indexing on platforms like PubMed. I recently received an invitation to submit a paper with a 100% APC waiver if it’s accepted.

I’ve published in a few MDPI journals before (never paid), and those papers have been cited fairly often. But I’ve also seen increasing criticism online suggesting that MDPI is low-key predatory, and it’s making me second-guess having those publications on my CV.

What’s your take? Are these concerns valid, or is the criticism overblown?

Comments

  1. BolivianDancer Avatar

    Anyone who contacts you first is a clown.

  2. ostuberoes Avatar

    I understand that MDPI does do peer review but it is sort of a joke, bad reviews get ignored, and most papers eventually make it through the mill. Some journals are better than others, supposedly, but the whole publishing house has a stink about it, why get involved?

    Right or wrong, I definitely am not impressed by papers in MDPI journals, though that isn’t enough on its own to make me doubt the overall CV. It is sort of a blemish to me, though. Just my opinion.

  3. Chairman-Mau Avatar

    Don’t publish in MDPI if you can avoid it! Do some good papers go through their journals? Certainly. But they are exploitative, with stupidly short review times. They are a symptom of the issues with our modern publishing ecosystem.

  4. Novel-Story-4537 Avatar

    MDPI journals have bad reputations for predatory practices and shoddy review standards. I would stay away. The fact that they are begging you to submit is already a big red flag.

  5. cat-head Avatar

    > Hi everyone, I’m new to this subreddit, so apologies if this has already been discussed.

    There is a search function at the top of each subreddit.

    To your question: I’ve never heard of anyone having their paper rejected in Languages (the one relevant for my field). Moreover, I’ve reviewed for them twice. I suggested rejection twice. The papers were accepted.

    Personally, I do not consider publications there to be real papers.

  6. BTCbob Avatar

    If you have something important to say, go say it in the form of a peer-reviewed scientific publication. When deciding where to publish, some factors include:

    1. do you have something important to say?
    2. where to say it? The reputation of journal matters – quality of peer review can help shape an impactful article
    3. is it open access? this is important to enable scientists to actually read it
    4. cost of open access fees – some are prohibitive

    So the first question is: do you have something important to say?

    MDPI is a relatively low-cost option to get your science out there for others to examine. I would say that the elites of the scientific community tend to go towards higher profile journals, but there are good papers in MDPI journals so it really depends more on the quality of your work (step 1) than the journal.

    So: question 1: do you have something important to share with the scientific community?

  7. thecoop_ Avatar

    The peer review process is an absolute joke. They flat out ignore both constructive criticism and clear dishonest reporting. I won’t review for them again and I certainly won’t publish in one of their journals.

  8. Fun-Astronomer5311 Avatar

    This question has been answered many times; search reddit. It is a crap publisher with questionable review processes. If your CV only has MDPI journals, then your reputation takes a hit. You tend to be classified as a poor researcher, or newbie; we may give you the benefit of the doubt by assuming that you did not know MDPI is questionable. In that case, we may read your actual papers to judge for ourselves if we are hiring you for a position. Otherwise, we just shake our head. The good news here is that many people just assume a journal is good if it has a high impact factor and it is listed by Scopus.

    MDPI has many strategies to make themselves look legit. Example: recruiting unsuspecting academics with a good CV or from reputable institutions to become guest editors. Of course, the biggest achievement that signals legitimacy is getting a journal recognized by Scopus. This is not that hard.

    MDPI caters for the following people: (i) students/researchers that require a published paper to graduate or to fulfil their contract; this is the process in China, and hence MDPI took advantage of this process to make their $$, (ii) works that cannot be published in top journals/conferences; i.e., it serves as a dumping ground, (iii) researchers who want to project they have published a lot to management or as part of their promotion process, especially in organizations who do not have a policy regarding research quality. This was the case many years ago in China, which MDPI took advantage of to make $$.