The Author(s) 2021. 2020). In particular, the 400 or so conferences that MDPI sponsored in 2019 (MDPI 2020) should all be carefully scrutinized. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. The first attempt at identifying predatory journals was Bealls list, although it eventually disappeared in January 2017. 2020). These formal criteria, such as unambiguous determination of APC and Publisher, accurate information on the journal metrics, the inclusion of the name of the editor-in-chief, etc. The results showed that the self-citation rates increased and was very much higher than those of the leading journals in the JCR category. As with the number of published articles, the number of special issues for all journals between 2018 and 2019 increased, in such an exorbitant manner that the number of special issues in the MDPI-journals under analysis was easily higher, in the majority of cases, than the number of ordinary issues of 53 MDPI journals analysed since 98.11% of 53 analysed journals published 12 or fewer issues per year in 2018 (data from JCR 2019 edition). JCR-indexed MDPI-journals betray both traits through a steady increase in number of their published articles (sometimes to several hundred in just one regular issue) and special issues. The same information was collected from journal web pages, WOS (Core Collection) and JCR for leading journals in each JCR category where the MDPI-journals were indexed. The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is owned by the German publishing house Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which is also the partial owner of Frontiers. The easiest way is to use a reference manager: The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs. are all necessary, although not sufficient conditions for proper identification of a predatory journal. Furthermore, no less importantly, the analysis showed that a large number of the citations that they receive are from other MDPI-journals. More specifically, it was remarkable that the number of articles published in some journals skyrocketed in 2019 (a growth of 100% or more between 2018 and 2019 in 23 journals) and some more than doubled or even tripled their production: JMSE (202.5%), Metabolites (228.57%), Electronics (229.66%), Foods (231.48%), Mathematics (239.13%), Antioxidants (240%), Pathogens (253.68%), Processes (254.28%), Cancers (280.25%), JCM (287.77%), Animals (391.2%), Biomolecules (391.7%), Plants (463.24%), Microorganisms (486.36%), Cells (498.97), and Medicina (554.91%). They are, in all, a threat to society as a whole, because whenever the articles that they publish are indexed in selective databases, which is the case of PubMed, the items achieve global exposure and are interpreted by readers, including patients, as trustworthy (Manca et al. (, Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark. However, to the best of the authors knowledge, the study of a publisher such as MDPI has not been approached, except for very specific research on one of the MDPI-journals, Sustainability, in relation to self-citations (Copiello 2019) and its APC (Khoo 2019). As depicted in Figure 5, the impact factors of all journals were reduced when self-citations were removed. These facts suggest that MDPI has been open to question, a publisher that has been moving within a grey zone. 2020) for inclusion in an objective definition. Intra-MDPI citation rate 2018 and 2019 (top 10 citing journals). Self-citation and citation cartels deviate from best editorial and publication practices by breaking with publication ethics and integrity, which are defining characteristics of predatory journals according to Grudniewicz et al. In 2019, 24 journals out of 53 had self-citation rates as high as 15%, which is the upper end of the normal range set by Clarivate (Table 2). It is beyond the scope of this research to answer that question based on the analysis conducted, further research is needed to address this key question. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. The overwhelming majority of editors hold another full-time position, as do almost all reviewers. In addition, it is highly unusual to have an article accepted without revisions. Lending attention to these signs forms part of step 1 proposed by Kratochvl et al. The alarming increase in the number of predatory journals (from 1,800 to 8,000 over the period 20104) and the exponential growth (from 53,000 to 420,000 between 2010 and 2014) of the articles that they publish (Shen and Bjork 2015) have rendered futile any effort to keep white and blacklists updated. Both, self-citation and intra-MDPI citation rates directly affects the numerator in the journal impact-factor calculation, raising the journal impact value. (2017) have reminded us. Copiello (2019) also analysed the citations and self-citations of articles published in the journal Sustainability in 2015 and found that the journal had a higher self-citation level than expected. Journal impact factors of MDPI-journals with and without self-citations (2018). As a consequence of the new context generated by the proliferation of predatory journals, it becomes necessary to review the evaluation policies (Beall 2016). The increase in the number of published articles between 2018 and 2019 ranged from 554.91% in Medicina to 18.3% in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (IJGI). WOSPredatory Reports328Frontiers19951SCIE4SSCI223MDPI 422 ! Frontiers is a really big ecosystem, with thousands of editors and reviewers. Our chance investigation started after a message from a stranger took me inside a predatory conference and has uncovered how predatory science has ensnared scientists at every level and made a small fortune for the conference organizers. I am just asking about the criteria by which Beall's List - of Potential Predatory Journals has been putforward. Its average APC amounts to 1,138USD (OMICS 2020). Many of the studies on predatory journals in different scientific fields have been completed in reference to the journals listed on Bealls list, since discontinued (Shen and Bjork 2015; Frandsen 2017; Demir 2018; Alrawadieh 2020; Downes 2020). Number of articles published by MDPI-journals (2018 and 2019). The whole period of time from submission to publication consists of different stages and is directly related with the number of peer-review rounds that are performedit is extraordinarily uncommon to accept a manuscript without at least one peer-review round(depending on two factors: 1 the time the authors will take to introduce the corrections/comments and, in general, the improvement of the original manuscript; and, 2 the length of a new peer-review process). It is important that academia and scholars become aware both of the risks of falling into the networks of predatory journals and, in addition, academics should be capable of properly identifying these journals, without presupposing that their inclusion in a prestigious database is a sort of quality hallmark that guarantees the integrity of their authorship, and both their peer-review and their editing processes (Severin and Low 2019; Cortegiani et al. However, as previously shown, some MDPI journals name are very similar to other publishers journals breaching the required condition of not been easily confused with another journal. 2018; Bond et al. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. 2020). This analysis of the practices of MDPI is of relevance to researchers and for research institutions and funding bodies as well as for JCR itself, which could see its prestige compromised, if it incorporated predatory journals among its indexed journals. Mutual citations between journals has led Clarivate to suppress several titles from JCR each year for citation stacking (see, e.g. Second, only limited insights are possible because not all the journals in the control group are in the framework of gold open access (which would allow a direct comparison). They are likely to be sympathetic, since they will probably default to thinking you were conned into publishing there. 1. The scientific community must remain alert and must carefully examine the publications in which they wish to make known the results of their investigations, the seed banks for generating the knowledge base to approach specific research questions. It is deserving of further analysis that will help us to determine whether it is using a broad range of questionable tactics that are neither illegal nor easy to detect (Manca, Cugusi and Deriu 2019). Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a reference for the assessment of researchers and for grant-making decisions, is used as a standard whitelist, in so far as the selectivity of a JCR-indexed journal adds a legitimacy of sorts to the articles that the journal publishes. For example, they no longer have webs with typographic errors, but with a much more sophisticated appearance, converting themselves into a non-evident/hidden predatory publisher, in view of their editorial behaviour. More specifically, in general terms, the average time from submission to first decision from MDPI-journals was 19days, both in 2019 and 2018 (MDPI 2020), despite the increase in the number of both journals (15 new journals from 2018) and articles which were published (a 64.1% increase compared to 2018). The drop in the impact factor ranged between 38.96% in the case of Sustainability to 0.68% in Medicina with an average reduction of 14.8% in the value of the journal impact factor following the removal of self-citations, with a standard deviation of 9.31 (Figure 5). None declared. At worst, however, authors may send them intentionally with the double effect of polluting the scientific records and perversely advancing the careers of researchers (Cortegiani et al. BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. We hope researchers make use of this checklist and avoid falling prey to bogus conference organizers. Economics and Business Management Faculty, Business Management and Marketing Department, University of Seville, Avda. bhttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/computer-science/journals/fast-publication. Frontiers 2019 Frontiers Media 2020 Frontiers Media Frontiers in Pharmacology is a leading journal in its field, publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research across disciplines, including basic and clinical pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, pharmacy and toxicology. (2017) warned researchers from the biomedical field that APCs lower than 150$ were suspect. 2018), MEDLINE, or Embase (Hayden 2020) with the appearance of legitimate scientific journals. Ramn y Cajal. a year Country of Publication: England Publisher: Frederic was setting up a new, online, open access, peer reviewed . Once accepted, time to posting the final word document online on a reputable journals Web site i.e. Always check the website thoroughly 2. The number of special issues was over twice the number of ordinary issues in 92.45% of the MDPI-journals under analysis. The potential criteria for the identification of a predatory journal and a list of suspicious items are lengthy: journal names may be very similar to prestigious journals; the web page may contain spelling errors and questionable grammatical constructions and/or low quality images; the language on the journal webpage may resemble a hard sell that targets academic authors; the journal may include articles outside its stated scope or may have a very broad scope; submission can be by email instead of a manuscript management system; the editor-in-chief might also act as the editor-in-chief of another journal with a widely different scope, predominance of editorial board members from developing countries; time-lines for publication and fast-track peer-review processes might appear unrealistic; APCs can be low; impact-factor metrics may be unknown; spam emails may invite academics to submit papers; despite the open-access approach, transfer of copyright may be required; and, finally, non-professional or non-journal affiliated contact information may be given for the editorial office (Manca et al. 2020b). The lack of content analysis is a limitation of this study and could be performed in future research with a random sample of articles published in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals in line with Step 2 proposed by Kratochvl et al. These actions will send out a clear message to researchers to refuse to publish in and to support predatory journals. Frontiers in Oncology. Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research across the entire field of cancer research. This multidisciplinary open-access journal is at the forefront of disseminating and . Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research across the entire field of cancer research. Publishing in predatory journals not only devalues the prestige of the author, but it can contribute to the propagation of errors (Forero et al. A platinum/diamond open-access model might be close to an ideal academic publishing modelaccording to the terminology of Siler (2020)since it prioritizes professional rather than market logics and then eliminates the drive to publish as many articles as possible to maximize revenue. (2020). Predatory Journals: Who Publishes in Them and Why? In turn, the publishing house Elsevier reported the average review and production times of its journals in such varied areas as Environmental Science, Computer Science, and Mathematics and Statistics (see Table 4). Similar pernicious effects can be expected from citation stacking when journals cite each other to raise their impact factors (Heneberg 2016). This is an especially important aspect when the external appearance of the predatory journals, such as the OMICS journals, has reached such a level of sophistication that they totally or partially comply with the formal criteria that serve to differentiate between predatory and legitimate journals. Just in the same year 2007, the OA publisher Frontiers was . Besides, JCR-indexed MDPI-journals mimicking names and publicly claimed rapid publication is in direct breach of the COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME Principles for Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing. Frontiers Media is a publisher of open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. (2019): predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices. For example, Sustainability published a total of 7,414 articles in 2019, with peer-review periods of between 13.94 and 17.75days from submission to first review, while Vaccines published 226 articles in 2019 with peer-review periods ranging between 14.61 and 26.04days. Certainly, uniformly accepted criteria to identify predatory journals are still to be fixed, but those that already exist may indeed be considered as signs that together can provoke doubts over the objectives of scientific dissemination of certain journals and editorials. sharon r pine. The journal welcomes submissions on a wide spectrum of cell and developmental biology . This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (, Improving universities activities in academic startup support through public interventions: The effectiveness of the German programme EXISTleverage of potentials, Changing conceptualization of innovation in the European Union and its impact on universities: Critical junctures and evolving institutional demands, Gender diversity and publication activityan analysis of STEM in the UK, Assessing the variety of collaborative practices in translational research: An analysis of scientists ego-networks, Early career academic's odyssey: A narrative study of her professional identity construction. The size of the editorial board is remarkably higher in all 53-MDPI journals analysed than in control leading journals. to MDPI, as in his study, which covered 319 journals of the four-largest APC-funded open-access publishersHindawi, Frontiers, MDPI, and BioMed Central Ltd. (BMC)between 2012 and 2018, . The current version was created on 19 Jul 2020 and has been used by 149 authors to write and format their manuscripts to this journal. Shedding further light on MDPI-journal citing sources, the top 10 MDPI journals for citations listed on the WOS were analysed and intra-MDPI citation levels were identified with other MDPI-journals. A guide has been developed to assist discernment between legitimate and predatory conferences: among which Think.Check.Attend. Related Infographic. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (2019) clarified that predatory publishing generally refers to the systematic for-profit publication of purportedly scholarly content (in journals and articles, monographs, books, or conference proceedings) in a deceptive or fraudulent way and without any regard for quality assurance [ so] these journals exist solely for profit without any commitment to publication ethics or integrity of any kind. Even though, on the one hand, the Journal Impact Factor is qualified by Ioannidis and Thombs (2019) as the most widely used, misused and abused bibliometric index in academic science, it is, on the other hand, a widely used tool for curricula evaluation and for making grant awards, as well as being used as a selection criterion for the dissemination of scientific results. The revision times of the 53 journals under analysis were surprisingly similar, regardless of the high variability of the articles published in each journal in 2019 and were, in many cases, very much shorter than time spans that may be considered normal. The MDPI, with its headquarters in Basel (Switzerland), formerly known as Molecular Diversity Preservation International (https://www.mdpi.com/about/history) that launched its first two journals (Molecules and Mathematical and Computational Applications) in 1996, operates a gold open- access framework. He demonstrated that the self-citations of Sustainability, in 2016 and 2017, in relation to articles published in 2015, in no way corresponded to a uniform probability distribution. Finally, the intense proliferation of predatory journals has given rise to predatory/fake conferences, equally pernicious for academia, and the subject of warnings from COPE (2019), as predatory journals and conferences are two sides of the same coin (Cortegiani et al. Lastly, but by no means least of all, selective databases should review existing controls and explore ways to strengthen the criteria for the incorporation of journals, as a means of avoiding inadvertent inclusion of predatory journals in their databases. As addressed in the discussion further work is necessary to understand whether these differences are meaningful and whether they persist when compared to a larger and more representative sample of journals in their respective subject areas. (2019) state that predatory journals prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and that their behaviour includes deviation from best editorial and publication practices. Predatory journals are a global threat to science (Harvey and Weinstein 2017; Grudniewicz et al. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) released the Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing (last version published 15 January 2018) together with the Directory of Open-Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open-Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). As such a single proxy was used in the form of the non-MDPI leading journal. Moreover, the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series, and Publishers downgraded MDPI to 0 in 2019 and later upgraded it to 1 again. This is calculated by dividing the number of papers that the journal has published (924), by the number of editors (288). The limitations of the available resources have meant that the analysis has been restricted to the behaviour of MDPI-journals in JCR over 2 years, 2018 and 2019, as well as the information available for 2020 in January 2020. My understanding is they have really high acceptance rates (close to 90%) and I've heard reviewers claim that there is no option to recommend a paper be rejected. In 2019, the APCs in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals ranged from 1000 CHF in Agronomy, Diagnostics, and IJGI to 2000 CHF in Marine Drugs and Nutrients with the majority of titles showing an increase in the APC from 2018 to 2019 (Figure 2). Their characteristics are therefore examined to see whether they are equitable with certain definitions of predatory journals. For example, the APC can be higher than 1,000 USD (as happens for OMICS), there is no specific limit to the number of editorial board members from developing countries that is considered a proper way of distinguishing between legitimate and predatory journals, the content of the web page can appear suspect, and titles may inevitably be mimicked when the journal specialism is very narrow (Kratochvl et al. 's (2019) definition. Given the immense difficulties of keeping a list of predatory journals updated, the use of one from among the very many abundant checklists, such as Think.Check.Submit (https://thinkchecksubmit.org/), is encouraged1. because it is used as a proxy for both quality and integrity. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. In JCR-indexed MDPI-journals, if the trend of increasing numbers of published articles in all journals continues into 2020 and taking into account the generalized rise in the APC for 2020, MDPI may reasonably expect to see a rise in its income in 2020. Search for other works by this author on: Plagiarism and Predatory Journals: A Threat to Scientific Integrity, Publishing in Predatory Tourism and Hospitality Journals: Mapping the Academic Market and Identifying Response Strategies, Supporting a Definition of Predatory Publishing, Predatory Publishers Are Corrupting Open Access, Predatory Journals and the Breakdown of Research Cultures, Dangerous Predatory Publishers Threaten Medical Research, Faculty Applicants Attempt to Inflate Cvs Using Predatory Journals, American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, Predatory Publishing is Everyones Concern, A Large-Scale Analysis of Impact Factor Biased Journals Self-Citations, On the Skeweness of Journal Self-Citations and Publisher Self-Citations: Cues for Discusin from a Case Study, Inclusion of Predatory Journals in Scopus is Inflating Scholars Metrics and Advancing Careers, Predatory Journals and Conferences: Why Fake Counts, Citations and Metrics of Journals Discontinued from Scopus for Publication Concerns: The GhoS(t)copus Project, Checklists to Detect Potential Predatory Biomedical Journals: A Systematic Review. 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