4 ms·

For what it's worth, MDPI has a lot of criticisms from academia as a publisher. Criticisms regarding editorial reliability, methodology acceptance, rigour, etc,

by PakG1 2y ago

For what it's worth, MDPI has a lot of criticisms from academia as a publisher. Criticisms regarding editorial reliability, methodology acceptance, rigour, etc, etc. Here's just a smattering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers... It's been enough where I end up automatically ignoring MDPI papers unless someone I respect recommends one to me. For better or worse. But MDPI made it's own bed in many ways.

PaulHoule 2y ago
Go take a look at Frontiers.
- light_hue_1 2y ago
  There are reasonable MDPI journals, and reasonable Frontiers. Just like there are predatory IEEE journals and conferences. You can't just look at the publisher. A quick shortcut is to look at who are the editors/organizers. If you don't see affiliations from the West, it's unfortunately a very bad sign.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    ... and plenty of ethical problems in terms of the very business model of Science, Nature, Elsevier and all that. Not to mention what they've done to maintain their comfortable position. MDPI is the most active RSS feed by far in my collection, they publish a lot of stuff. I'd be interested in getting feeds of Open Access papers on other journals (say from Science) but so far no dice.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
I've heard this and actually had a paper published in an MDPI journal. My personal experience was that it was astonishing quick to do so. Usually the submission/review/acceptance/publishing process is many months but this was less than two if I remember correctly. The paper was reviewed and the reviewer comments were reasonable. Not just editorial but with technical comments. So that seemed fine. As soon as we submitted the revised manuscript it was pretty much published immediately. So all the normal steps were followed, just at a faster rate it seemed. Again, this is my one and only experience with them. I'd be interested if others have any...
kragen 2y ago
those criticisms are from people who think that publishers and reviewers should evaluate scientific papers, when obviously the right way to evaluate papers is by the larger research community over the course of many years. worse, many of the criticisms are from institutions that are attempting to use bibliometrics for hiring and tenure decisions, which is an obviously stupid idea most papers are worthless, but when they are first written, it is too early to tell which ones they are; of course reviewers' suggestions are often helpful in improving the quality of a paper, but they cannot improve a worthless paper into a groundbreaking one pre-publication peer review was instituted mostly in the mid-twentieth century and should be regarded as a failed experiment belonging to the age of paper. most peer-reviewed papers are worthless, and peer review often serves merely to retard progress most of the papers i see on mdpi are mediocre, but some are useful, and it certainly isn't vixra-style garbage
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Accusations against MDPI, Frontiers and such take this form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing the claim is that they are ripping off the scientists. Note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall was forced to retract his claim that MDPI was predatory.
  - kragen 2y ago
    some do take that form, yes; others are simply complaints that tenure and hiring boards were going to have to evaluate the quality of candidates' research for themselves because mdpi wasn't doing it for them
- godelski 2y ago
  Peer review is great in theory, but fails because it makes too many assumptions and because the incentive structure. And it certainly doesn't scale well. It's important to remember that the point of publishing is communication. Anything more or less is ill founded. It is obtuse to think that a few people can read a paper and know it's validity. It's falsifiable but even that's fuzzy. The problem then comes down to the incentive structures. Why do people cheat? Because we're lazy evaluators. It's odd to me that we won't read the works of peers in a department, lab, whatever. But doing that would be a much stronger form of evaluation than anything that could be inferred from citations, h-index, conference ranking, etc. Plus, the structure is to push novelty fast and frequently. That's not only not possible but ignores a fundamental aspect of science: reproducibility. But this also doesn't mean there aren't scam publishers and publishers scammers prefer. But I'd say that those are a result of the former issue. Because metrics are not being treated as guides. It's just Goodhart's Law in action.

by PakG1 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago

Go take a look at Frontiers.

light_hue_1 2y ago
There are reasonable MDPI journals, and reasonable Frontiers. Just like there are predatory IEEE journals and conferences. You can't just look at the publisher. A quick shortcut is to look at who are the editors/organizers. If you don't see affiliations from the West, it's unfortunately a very bad sign.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  ... and plenty of ethical problems in terms of the very business model of Science, Nature, Elsevier and all that. Not to mention what they've done to maintain their comfortable position. MDPI is the most active RSS feed by far in my collection, they publish a lot of stuff. I'd be interested in getting feeds of Open Access papers on other journals (say from Science) but so far no dice.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

I've heard this and actually had a paper published in an MDPI journal. My personal experience was that it was astonishing quick to do so. Usually the submission/review/acceptance/publishing process is many months but this was less than two if I remember correctly. The paper was reviewed and the reviewer comments were reasonable. Not just editorial but with technical comments. So that seemed fine. As soon as we submitted the revised manuscript it was pretty much published immediately. So all the normal steps were followed, just at a faster rate it seemed. Again, this is my one and only experience with them. I'd be interested if others have any...

kragen 2y ago

those criticisms are from people who think that publishers and reviewers should evaluate scientific papers, when obviously the right way to evaluate papers is by the larger research community over the course of many years. worse, many of the criticisms are from institutions that are attempting to use bibliometrics for hiring and tenure decisions, which is an obviously stupid idea most papers are worthless, but when they are first written, it is too early to tell which ones they are; of course reviewers' suggestions are often helpful in improving the quality of a paper, but they cannot improve a worthless paper into a groundbreaking one pre-publication peer review was instituted mostly in the mid-twentieth century and should be regarded as a failed experiment belonging to the age of paper. most peer-reviewed papers are worthless, and peer review often serves merely to retard progress most of the papers i see on mdpi are mediocre, but some are useful, and it certainly isn't vixra-style garbage

PaulHoule 2y ago
Accusations against MDPI, Frontiers and such take this form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing the claim is that they are ripping off the scientists. Note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall was forced to retract his claim that MDPI was predatory.
- kragen 2y ago
  some do take that form, yes; others are simply complaints that tenure and hiring boards were going to have to evaluate the quality of candidates' research for themselves because mdpi wasn't doing it for them
godelski 2y ago
Peer review is great in theory, but fails because it makes too many assumptions and because the incentive structure. And it certainly doesn't scale well. It's important to remember that the point of publishing is communication. Anything more or less is ill founded. It is obtuse to think that a few people can read a paper and know it's validity. It's falsifiable but even that's fuzzy. The problem then comes down to the incentive structures. Why do people cheat? Because we're lazy evaluators. It's odd to me that we won't read the works of peers in a department, lab, whatever. But doing that would be a much stronger form of evaluation than anything that could be inferred from citations, h-index, conference ranking, etc. Plus, the structure is to push novelty fast and frequently. That's not only not possible but ignores a fundamental aspect of science: reproducibility. But this also doesn't mean there aren't scam publishers and publishers scammers prefer. But I'd say that those are a result of the former issue. Because metrics are not being treated as guides. It's just Goodhart's Law in action.