Category Archives: oa.mdpi

ResearchGate and MDPI Partner to Boost the Visibility of Open Access Content through Journal Home

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“This new partnership will expand the reach and visibility of MDPI’s participating flagship journals with ResearchGate’s highly relevant community of more than 25 million researchers globally.

Around 210,000 version-of-record articles from these 10 titles will be readily available on ResearchGate, including the full archive material and all new articles as they are published. These journals also benefit from enhanced brand visibility with dedicated journal profiles, prominent representation on all associated article pages and all relevant touchpoints across the ResearchGate network – keeping the journals top of mind with their reader and author audiences. All articles covered by the new partnership will automatically be added to the authors’ publication records in ResearchGate. This not only reduces MDPI authors’ needs for direct management but also offers them valuable insights in to the impact of their work, including data about readership and citations….”

Public funds being swallowed up by scientific journals with dubious articles | Science | EL PAÍS English

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“A strange phenomenon has transformed the world scientific system. Suddenly, academic journals that were previously weekly or biweekly have started publishing several special issues each day. There are unusual cases, such as the hyperprolific environmental and health research journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH), which last year published 17,000 scientific studies, 13 times more than in 2016, according to engineer Pablo Gómez Barreiro’s calculations. The theoretically biweekly journal has reached an output speed of six special issues per day and in recent years has been the preferred journal of Spanish scientists seeking to publish their work. The publishing house that owns it, MDPI, was founded in Switzerland by the Chinese chemist Shu-Kun Lin and has multiplied its income, thanks to a transfer of millions of euros of public money budgeted for science. It is a bubble that is about to burst, as a study by Gómez Barreiro and three other colleagues suggests….

Gómez Barreiro gives an extreme example: Professor Elsayed Tag Eldin, dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of the Future, a private institution in Cairo (Egypt) had barely published studies before, but this year he has already published 418, more than one every day, on all kinds of topics: Covid-19, solar panels, nanofluids, agriculture, even cyberattacks. He publishes more studies than anyone other scientist in the world….”

 

 

Guest Post – Reputation and Publication Volume at MDPI and Frontiers – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Until recently, MDPI and Frontiers were known for their meteoric rise. At one point, powered by the Guest Editor model, the two publishers combined for about 500,000 papers (annualized), which translated into nearly USD $1,000,000,000 annual revenue. Their growth was extraordinary, but so has been their contraction. MDPI has declined by 27% and Frontiers by 36% in comparison to their peak.

Despite their slowdown, MDPI and Frontiers have become an integral part of the modern publishing establishment. Their success reveals that their novel offering resonates with thousands of researchers. Their turbulent performance, however, shows that their publishing model is subject to risk, and its implementation should acknowledge and mitigate such risk….”

Never mind predatory publishers… what about ‘grey’ publishers? | Profesional de la información

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Abstract:  The Harbingers project, which studied the working lives and scholarly communication behaviour of early career researchers (ECRs) over 6 years, found evidence of changing attitudes to questionable (grey) publishing. Thus, whilst predatory publishers have come to be treated with equanimity, as a problem easily dealt with, there was growing concern with the high volume of low-grade research being generated, some of which by ‘grey’ open access publishers for want of a better name (questionable and non-standard have also been used). With the recent announcement (2023) that the government of Malaysia (a Harbinger case country) is not providing Article Processing Charges (APCs) for articles published by MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi on quality and cost grounds, we set out to see what lay behind this decision and whether other countries exhibited similar concerns. Information was obtained by asking Harbinger country leads, mostly embedded in research universities, from Australia, China, France, Israel, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, UK, and the US to conduct desk research to establish what is happening. It was found that countries, like ECRs, appear to have formed into two different camps, with China, Poland, France, and Spain joining Malaysia in the camp of those who felt concerned about these publishers and the UK, US, Israel, and Australia belonging to the camp of the unconcerned. Explanations for the split are furnished and whether the Malaysian position will prevail elsewhere is considered. Finally, in this paper, we have aired issues/concerns, rather than provided robust, systematic data. For a systematic study we shall have to wait for the fuller study we are hoping to conduct.

Public access to published science is under threat in the US | InPublishing

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Eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill’s draft language.

Frontiers says The US House Appropriations Committee has released its 2024 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. It proposes new spending of $58 billion and seeks to “rein in the Washington bureaucracy by right-sizing agencies and programs.”

A group of eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the bill’s draft language. If enacted, it would block federally funded research from being freely available to American taxpayers without delay on publication.

Individual Americans would be prevented from seeing the full benefits of the more than $90 billion in scientific research they fund each year via taxes. Science for the few who can access it – as opposed to the many who pay for it – is inefficient as scientific or democratic governmental policy.

 

 

Flukt fra tidsskrift: Redaktører og flertall i redaksjonsråd trekker seg

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From Google’s English:  This is not a problematic journal, it is not a rogue journal, but a journal that is about publishing cannot be suspected of doing anything wrong.

The words come from university librarian Jan Erik Frantsvåg at UiT Norway’s Arctic University.

They come after key people have resigned from the journal Publications, which is published by the publisher MDPI, the world’s largest in open publishing, also known as open access.

The university librarian is one of those who has resigned as a member of the journal’s editorial board. Senior advisor Craig Aaen-Stockdale at BI and Professor Oscar Westlund at OsloMet have the same opinion.

They are not alone.

“When seemingly insurmountable conflicts arise between publishers and academics over the direction of a journal, withdrawing support is often the only course of action we are left with,” says a letter from 23 of those who have resigned from the editorial board, including the three Norwegians.” …

So what’s behind it?

According to Frantsvåg, it is about the editors feeling that they were not heard when they raised problems, on behalf of the editorial board. In an article in Khrono today, the three Norwegians on the editorial board write that, among other things, it is about ensuring that the reputation of the journal should not depend on what happens in other MDPI journals.

They further write that the editors experienced being measured by “simple measures of success, such as the Journal Impact Factor and other bibliometric measures”. The editorial board must have repeatedly stated that the use of such measures was contrary to the so-called Dora declaration, which already ten years ago pointed the finger at the use of quantitative measures, not least the journals’ impact factor (Journal Impact Factor)….”

A decade of changes in OA and non-OA journal publication and production – Eungi Kim, Madhu Sudhan Atteraya, 2023

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Abstract:  The objective of this study was to explore the trends in the publication and production of open access (OA) and non-OA journals and articles over the last decade. Non-OA journals include subscription and hybrid journals, the articles of which cannot be freely accessed by researchers. To conduct this study, we used SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) data from 2011 to 2021. In analyzing the SJR data, we categorized publishers by the number of journals and articles published. The results showed the following: (a) although the number of OA journals has increased rapidly between 2011 and 2021, their share of total publications is still significantly lower than that of non-OA journals; (b) between 2011 and 2021, the number of publishers of non-OA journals had decreased slightly, while the number of OA journal publishers has increased rapidly; (c) publishers of all sizes increased the production of OA journal articles between 2011 and 2021, but the share of top publishers increased the most; and (d) MDPI, as a born-OA publisher, has become a global leader in OA journal article publishing in recent years.

 

Fast-growing open-access journals stripped of coveted impact factors | Science | AAAS

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“Nearly two dozen journals from two of the fastest growing open-access publishers, including one of the world’s largest journals by volume, will no longer receive a key scholarly imprimatur. On 20 March, the Web of Science database said it delisted the journals along with dozens of others, stripping them of an impact factor, the citation-based measure of quality that, although controversial, carries weight with authors and institutions. The move highlights continuing debate about a business model marked by high volumes of articles, ostensibly chosen for scientific soundness rather than novelty, and the practice by some open-access publishers of recruiting large numbers of articles for guest-edited special issues.

The Web of Science Master Journal List, run by the analytics company Clarivate, lists journals based on 24 measures of quality, including effective peer review and adherence to ethical publishing practices, and periodically checks that listed journals meet the standards. Clarivate calculates impact factors for a select subset of journals on the list. The company expanded quality checks this year because of “increasing threats to the integrity of the scholarly record,” Web of Science’s Editor-in-Chief Nandita Quaderi says. The company removed 50 journals from the list, an unusually large number for a single year, and Clarivate said it is continuing to review 450 more, assisted by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool….”

Fast-growing open-access journals stripped of coveted impact factors | Science | AAAS

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“Nearly two dozen journals from two of the fastest growing open-access publishers, including one of the world’s largest journals by volume, will no longer receive a key scholarly imprimatur. On 20 March, the Web of Science database said it delisted the journals along with dozens of others, stripping them of an impact factor, the citation-based measure of quality that, although controversial, carries weight with authors and institutions. The move highlights continuing debate about a business model marked by high volumes of articles, ostensibly chosen for scientific soundness rather than novelty, and the practice by some open-access publishers of recruiting large numbers of articles for guest-edited special issues.

The Web of Science Master Journal List, run by the analytics company Clarivate, lists journals based on 24 measures of quality, including effective peer review and adherence to ethical publishing practices, and periodically checks that listed journals meet the standards. Clarivate calculates impact factors for a select subset of journals on the list. The company expanded quality checks this year because of “increasing threats to the integrity of the scholarly record,” Web of Science’s Editor-in-Chief Nandita Quaderi says. The company removed 50 journals from the list, an unusually large number for a single year, and Clarivate said it is continuing to review 450 more, assisted by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool….”

Understanding theIncreasing Market Share of the Academic Publisher “Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute” in the Publication Output of Central and Eastern European Countries: A Case Study of Hungary

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As the open access movement has gained widespread popularity in the scientific community, academic publishers have gradually adapted to the new environment. The pioneer open access journals have turned themselves into megajournals, and the subscription-based publishers have established open access branches and have turned subscription-based journals into hybrid ones. Maybe the most dramatic outcome of the open access boom is the market entry of such fast-growing open access publishers as Frontiers and Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). By 2021, in terms of the number of papers published, MDPI has become one of the largest academic publishers worldwide. However, the publisher’s market shares across countries and regions show an uneven pattern. Whereas in such scientific powers as the United States and China, MDPI has remained a relatively small-scale player, it has gained a high market share in Europe, particularly in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. In 2021, 28 percent of the SCI/SSCI papers authored/co-authored by researchers from CEE countries were published in MDPI journals, a share that was as high as the combined share of papers published by Elsevier and Springer Nature, the two largest academic publishers in the world. This paper seeks to find an explanation for the extensively growing share of MDPI in the publication outputs of CEE countries by choosing Hungary as a case study. To do this, by employing data analysis, some unique features of MDPI will be revealed. Then, we will present the results of a questionnaire survey conducted among Hungary-based researchers regarding MDPI and the factors that motivated them to publish in MDPI journals. Our results show that researchers generally consider MDPI journals’ sufficiently prestigious, emphasizing the importance of the inclusion of MDPI journals in Scopus and Web of Science databases and their high ranks and impacts. However, most researchers posit that the quick turnaround time that MDPI journals offer is the top driver of publishing in such journals.

MDPI Journals: 2015 -2021 | Dan Brockington

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“In this blog I report on growth of MDPI journals and papers from 2015-2021. It updates previous blogs on the same topic (the most recent is here) that looked at growth up to 2020….

By every measure MDPI’s growth continues to be remarkable. The rate of revenue increase has slowed in the last two years, to just over 50%, but even that remains extraordinary.  Note that the proportion of submissions that are published has increased, from around 44% two years ago to over 55% currently (Table 1; Figure 1)….

The growth in publications is partly sustained by lower rejection rates. The journals with the lowest rejection rates used to count for only a minority of publications and fees (Tables 2-4). Now figures for 2021 show that journals with low rejection rates are producing a higher proportion of MDPI publications….

MDPI itself has been aware of the dangers of being too inclusive. In its 2015 annual report it noted that the overall rejection rate had increased since last year (from 52 to 54%). This achievement was listed in one of the key performance indicators as a sign of progress….

Because acceptance and rejection data are no longer available on the MDPI website, we will not know what is happening to rejection rates. We cannot know, at the level of each journal, how inclusive they are, or are becoming. This points to a wider need for all publishing houses to be more transparent with the data of their journals to allow researchers to make informed choices about their journals. MDPI’s transparency had been welcome. It is now, unfortunately, following the standards set by the other publishing houses….”

An interview with Delia Mihaila of MDPI – DOAJ News Service

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“In 2022, MDPI is supporting DOAJ at the Sustaining Level, a contribution made at a level that recognises the need to properly support open access infrastructure. We last caught up with MDPI in 2018 and a lot has changed. We sent Delia some questions about what’s moving in the MDPI world….”

Hintergrund – Der MDPI-Verlag – Wolf im Schafspelz? [Background: MDPI – A wolf in sheep’s clothing?] | Laborjournal online

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by Henrik Müller

Die unorthodoxen Methoden des schweizerischen Verlagshauses MDPI spalten die Wissenschaftsgemeinde. Fördert es mit seiner Flut an Sonderausgaben und ultraschnellem Peer Review den wissenschaftlichen Austausch? Oder schafft es wissenschaftliche Qualität ab? Kritiker und Befürworter sind ganz unterschiedlicher Auffassung.

Scilit – Scientific & Scholarly Research Database

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“Scilit is a comprehensive content aggregator platform for scholarly publications. It is developed and maintained by the open access publisher MDPI AG. It is offered for free to scientists and scholars. Using widely automated approaches to sourcing and curating data, we cover newly published content from a variety of sources within hours or days. Scilit currently covers journal articles, book chapters, monographs and preprints. For more information, please see the Scilit brochure….”

Response to: ‘Bibliometric Analysis and Impact of Open-Access Editorials in Spain’ report from ANECA

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“On 1 October 2021, ANECA released a public report entitled “Bibliometric analysis and impact of open-access publishers in Spain”, raising controversy in the Spanish academic community. Stakeholders have quickly responded with surprise, criticism and rebuttal. In our own report analysis, we were perplexed by the evident lack of academic rigor and inappropriate methodology.

We were surprised and concerned that ANECA established the principles for the evaluating of researchers in Spain based on a report with a clear bias against open access journals. Similarly, we do not understand why such a report has been prepared by researchers specializing in marketing and tourism, without experience in the field of bibliometrics….

The report follows a perverse logic: whatever is not standard is considered negative, based on a standard defined by the average value of publication volume and rate of self-citations, without considering additional factors that may affect the parameters analyzed. Thus, the analysis is based on a series of non-contrasted or referenced statements that the authors use to manufacture their own paradigms.

The authors assume that a more significant number of articles inevitably implies lower “quality, rigor and degree of contribution and originality” (page 7 of the report). However, they do not provide any evidence or references to support this claim. Such a statement lacks logic and could also be used to discredit the best-known traditional publishers, many of which have published more than open-access publishers. Furthermore, many JCR Q1 subscription journals have also been designated as non-standard behavior due to the number of articles they publish….”