8 ms·

MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is hig

MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is highly suspect, as it has allegedly pressured peer reviewers to accept low-quality work for publication in the recent past: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-resign-after-alleged-pressure-publish-mediocre-papers http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-r... https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/beware-academics-getting-reeled-scam-journals/ https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/be... I would treat this paper with, at most, the same skepticism as a preprint. Vitamin D supplementation is so easy and inexpensive, that if this correlation is truly that strong, I'd expect to see it in The Lancet or Nature or any one of the other mainstream journals.

alfalfasprout 6y ago
Well, you'd be surprised how much great research doesn't make it into Nature, et al. I wouldn't discount the paper purely because of that.
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Also, an actual peer reviewed paper came out recently that showed giving vitamin d to covid patients upon admitting them did not decrease death rates. I'll look for the link but it was front page here like two weeks ago.
  - coding123 6y ago
    Please find the link because about 2 / 3 months ago there was a story that was exactly the opposite finding. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366006 I've been monitoring HN for Vitamin D info very closely.
    - zamfi 6y ago
      I think the parent poster is referring to https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.16.20232397v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.16.20232397v... (Can't find the HN discussion link at the moment, unfortunately -- it didn't point to that particular link!) Worth noting that this RCT was for bolus supplementation of Vitamin D3 at some point in their hospital stay, and excluded patients already supplementing with D3. This study stands in stark contrast to the earlier pilot out of Spain: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076020302764?via%3Dihub#bib0100 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602... -- though as noted, this was not D3 but rather Calcifediol (a D3 metabolite), and a much smaller study.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arech 6y ago
    There's nothing contradictory in it. It may take several months to restore normal Vitamin D level from the state of deficiency, so it's very long process. On average much longer than typical Covid duration. Proper Vitamin D level should be reached _before_ contact with the virus. Then the data would be valuable and helpful. Theirs data doesn't show much, imho.
- adrianN 6y ago
  "Treat it as if it were a preprint" is different from discounting the paper.
  - neuronic 6y ago
    That's the science-snobby way of dismissing it.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Not at all, preprints are very important because the publishing process can take many months. In fast moving fields (e.g. COVID research) working with preprints is vital if you want to do cutting edge research.
g42gregory 6y ago
I think that easy and inexpensive treatment methods are getting very skeptical reception by the medical community. My sense is that this is the training from the medical school, which in turn, is influenced (to a degree of course) by the pharmaceutical companies.
- themihai 6y ago
  I think the inexpensive treatments are abused by many different actors because they carry little or no cost to develop, thus there is reason a to be sceptical. For example you can find a lot of supplements that claim to cure various cancers and many have been proven to have no effect. People even claim that objects or they by themselves cure diseases. If not much money or effort has been put into a 'treatment' you have reasons to sceptical, don't you think? It's like working in the financial services and someone is trying to sell you a $10 e-book that will make you rich in 1 year. It could do the trick but I bet you would be sceptical. Testing/clinical trials usually cost a lot and even if the treatment it's not great, at least you have some hard data that you can rely on.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Suffered horrific migraines for years. Was using injections that costs thousands. My routine these days? Magnesium, Vit D, and massaging TMJ joint. Diet helps a lot too. Cure cancer, no. Help various issues, often.
    - 0_____0 6y ago
      What was the process by which you found your self-treatment regimen? I've heard of magnesium's role with muscle clenching, what do the other things do?
      - treeman79 6y ago
        Had a LOT of muscle aches. Took it for a few weeks. Aches went away. Mostly stopped taking it.repeat every few months. Later on I started hearing from many sources to try it for migraines. Realized my migraines had been ebbing and worsening a lot. Got serous about taking it. About A 50% reduction In severity. Had multi hour ones 7 days a week. Can’t walk kind. Dentist suggested a mouth guard for TMJ. I looked up videos on it. Found a massage one, found a bad trigger point. 3 days later it eased up. Poof migraines almost completely gone. I tried basically everything. Elimination diet to find troublesome foods, etc. Prism glasses, etc Too much for here
jefft255 6y ago
MDPI also publishes some high quality work, in remote sensing serious labs do publish good work in their journals “Forests” and “Remote Sensing”. You are right to be skeptic, though. They have very lax review processes and will publish anything that looks like science because their incentives are screwed up. Pay-to-publish for-profit OA is just as bad as closed-access IMHO, and in some case it’s worse when the publisher is a non-profit professional organization.
- timkam 6y ago
  I somewhat agree, but many traditional publishers have an optional "pay for OA" model and more and more funding providers require OA. For journal publications, we (in the EU) almost always have to pay. However, MDPI is particularly aggressive in its editorial practices and marketing tactics. In my community, we sometimes publish "smaller" works there: when early-career researchers get to guest edit a special issue in an MDPI journal and we want to support them; i.e., we sometimes fall for MDPI's marketing tactics ;-) It's best to have journals that are owned by the community, but these take time to grow into venues that administrators respect: we can publish some work there, but it's not enough for building a competitive academic CV. Considering this article: it's just a comment, and to me it looks like something an expert can easily tear apart. A well-established researcher wouldn't publish such a comment in an MDPI journal (as one of the other comments suggests).
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
The Lancet or Nature don't exactly have stellar reputations anymore. Source reputability should not be weighted heavily when assessing new information in our information environment — this is a very outmoded, maladaptive norm.
untererdisch 6y ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77093-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77093-z
- mattmanser 6y ago
  The fatality rate was high in vitamin D deficient (21% vs 3.1%).
  - hda111 6y ago
    It’s just a correlation. No need to take vitamin d.
    - SifJar 6y ago
      Do you have some evidence of this?
      - Uberphallus 6y ago
        Yes, the very same paper. > Although results of an observational study, such as this one, need to be interpreted with caution, as done by the authors [1], due to the potential of residual confounding or reverse causality (i.e., vitamin D insufficiency resulting from poor health status at baseline rather than vice versa), You need a control group with vitamin D deficiency but no other health issues to prove the hypothesis. They are just stating there's a correlation worth looking into.
        skj 6y ago
        Rather, a control group who does not take vitamin D supplements. Choose them randomly and you can find causation (or lack thereof).
    - TomSwirly 6y ago
      Why do you say this? Almost half of Americans are vitamin D deficient, a lot more if you are Black or Hispanic: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-deficiency-symptoms#TOC_TITLE_HDR_1 https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-deficiency-sy... Vitamin D is very cheap, and it takes a lot to overdose: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/vitamin-d-toxicity/faq-20058108 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h... Up until a very short time ago, humans spent most of their time outside, and sunscreen did not exist. Now we spend nearly all our time inside, and many of us wear sunscreen whenever it's really sunny. And there's a serious correlation between low vitamin D levels and COVID-19 fatalities. We haven't proved causation yet, and we might never, but given the previous three points, there's every good reason to take vitamin D.
midnitewarrior 6y ago
The Lancet published this in May, strongly advising patients to address Vitamin D deficiency. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(20)30183-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...

alfalfasprout 6y ago

Well, you'd be surprised how much great research doesn't make it into Nature, et al. I wouldn't discount the paper purely because of that.

UShouldBWorking 6y ago
Also, an actual peer reviewed paper came out recently that showed giving vitamin d to covid patients upon admitting them did not decrease death rates. I'll look for the link but it was front page here like two weeks ago.
- coding123 6y ago
  Please find the link because about 2 / 3 months ago there was a story that was exactly the opposite finding. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366006 I've been monitoring HN for Vitamin D info very closely.
  - zamfi 6y ago
    I think the parent poster is referring to https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.16.20232397v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.16.20232397v... (Can't find the HN discussion link at the moment, unfortunately -- it didn't point to that particular link!) Worth noting that this RCT was for bolus supplementation of Vitamin D3 at some point in their hospital stay, and excluded patients already supplementing with D3. This study stands in stark contrast to the earlier pilot out of Spain: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076020302764?via%3Dihub#bib0100 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602... -- though as noted, this was not D3 but rather Calcifediol (a D3 metabolite), and a much smaller study.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Arech 6y ago
  There's nothing contradictory in it. It may take several months to restore normal Vitamin D level from the state of deficiency, so it's very long process. On average much longer than typical Covid duration. Proper Vitamin D level should be reached _before_ contact with the virus. Then the data would be valuable and helpful. Theirs data doesn't show much, imho.
adrianN 6y ago
"Treat it as if it were a preprint" is different from discounting the paper.
- neuronic 6y ago
  That's the science-snobby way of dismissing it.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Not at all, preprints are very important because the publishing process can take many months. In fast moving fields (e.g. COVID research) working with preprints is vital if you want to do cutting edge research.

g42gregory 6y ago

I think that easy and inexpensive treatment methods are getting very skeptical reception by the medical community. My sense is that this is the training from the medical school, which in turn, is influenced (to a degree of course) by the pharmaceutical companies.

themihai 6y ago
I think the inexpensive treatments are abused by many different actors because they carry little or no cost to develop, thus there is reason a to be sceptical. For example you can find a lot of supplements that claim to cure various cancers and many have been proven to have no effect. People even claim that objects or they by themselves cure diseases. If not much money or effort has been put into a 'treatment' you have reasons to sceptical, don't you think? It's like working in the financial services and someone is trying to sell you a $10 e-book that will make you rich in 1 year. It could do the trick but I bet you would be sceptical. Testing/clinical trials usually cost a lot and even if the treatment it's not great, at least you have some hard data that you can rely on.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Suffered horrific migraines for years. Was using injections that costs thousands. My routine these days? Magnesium, Vit D, and massaging TMJ joint. Diet helps a lot too. Cure cancer, no. Help various issues, often.
  - 0_____0 6y ago
    What was the process by which you found your self-treatment regimen? I've heard of magnesium's role with muscle clenching, what do the other things do?
    - treeman79 6y ago
      Had a LOT of muscle aches. Took it for a few weeks. Aches went away. Mostly stopped taking it.repeat every few months. Later on I started hearing from many sources to try it for migraines. Realized my migraines had been ebbing and worsening a lot. Got serous about taking it. About A 50% reduction In severity. Had multi hour ones 7 days a week. Can’t walk kind. Dentist suggested a mouth guard for TMJ. I looked up videos on it. Found a massage one, found a bad trigger point. 3 days later it eased up. Poof migraines almost completely gone. I tried basically everything. Elimination diet to find troublesome foods, etc. Prism glasses, etc Too much for here

jefft255 6y ago

MDPI also publishes some high quality work, in remote sensing serious labs do publish good work in their journals “Forests” and “Remote Sensing”. You are right to be skeptic, though. They have very lax review processes and will publish anything that looks like science because their incentives are screwed up. Pay-to-publish for-profit OA is just as bad as closed-access IMHO, and in some case it’s worse when the publisher is a non-profit professional organization.

timkam 6y ago
I somewhat agree, but many traditional publishers have an optional "pay for OA" model and more and more funding providers require OA. For journal publications, we (in the EU) almost always have to pay. However, MDPI is particularly aggressive in its editorial practices and marketing tactics. In my community, we sometimes publish "smaller" works there: when early-career researchers get to guest edit a special issue in an MDPI journal and we want to support them; i.e., we sometimes fall for MDPI's marketing tactics ;-) It's best to have journals that are owned by the community, but these take time to grow into venues that administrators respect: we can publish some work there, but it's not enough for building a competitive academic CV. Considering this article: it's just a comment, and to me it looks like something an expert can easily tear apart. A well-established researcher wouldn't publish such a comment in an MDPI journal (as one of the other comments suggests).

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

The Lancet or Nature don't exactly have stellar reputations anymore. Source reputability should not be weighted heavily when assessing new information in our information environment — this is a very outmoded, maladaptive norm.

untererdisch 6y ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77093-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77093-z

mattmanser 6y ago
The fatality rate was high in vitamin D deficient (21% vs 3.1%).
- hda111 6y ago
  It’s just a correlation. No need to take vitamin d.
  - SifJar 6y ago
    Do you have some evidence of this?
    - Uberphallus 6y ago
      Yes, the very same paper. > Although results of an observational study, such as this one, need to be interpreted with caution, as done by the authors [1], due to the potential of residual confounding or reverse causality (i.e., vitamin D insufficiency resulting from poor health status at baseline rather than vice versa), You need a control group with vitamin D deficiency but no other health issues to prove the hypothesis. They are just stating there's a correlation worth looking into.
      - skj 6y ago
        Rather, a control group who does not take vitamin D supplements. Choose them randomly and you can find causation (or lack thereof).
  - TomSwirly 6y ago
    Why do you say this? Almost half of Americans are vitamin D deficient, a lot more if you are Black or Hispanic: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-deficiency-symptoms#TOC_TITLE_HDR_1 https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-deficiency-sy... Vitamin D is very cheap, and it takes a lot to overdose: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/vitamin-d-toxicity/faq-20058108 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h... Up until a very short time ago, humans spent most of their time outside, and sunscreen did not exist. Now we spend nearly all our time inside, and many of us wear sunscreen whenever it's really sunny. And there's a serious correlation between low vitamin D levels and COVID-19 fatalities. We haven't proved causation yet, and we might never, but given the previous three points, there's every good reason to take vitamin D.

midnitewarrior 6y ago

The Lancet published this in May, strongly advising patients to address Vitamin D deficiency. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(20)30183-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...