The speed to publication is dependent on several things, but primarily on how many reviewers accept an editors invitation to review, how many of those who do accept actually complete a review, and how quickly the editor can make a decision based on their own read of the article and the reviewers comments. Based on a series of . Thus, universities, funding institutions, or any institution that evaluates scientific activity can disincentivize the submission of manuscripts to predatory journals and the acceptance of roles on their editorial committees, ignoring these milestones in the evaluation process of a curriculum vitae (Forero et al. 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). Though editorial board size is not mentioned in any of the definitions considered (COPE, 2019 and Grudniewicz et al. It was Elsevier and the allegedly learned International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC) which allowed Raoult's illegal chloroquine quackery. The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is owned by the German publishing house Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which is also the partial owner of Frontiers. Hence, specific recommendations are given to researchers, educational institutions and prestigious databases advising them to review their working relations with those sorts of journals. Why Beall's blacklist of predatory journals died. 2018; Bond et al. Further research is needed to compare the JCR-indexed MPDI journals to similar journals in their respective fields in order to understand whether the level of self-citation is significantly different for MDPI published journals. The journal welcomes submissions on a wide spectrum of cell and developmental biology . This is calculated by dividing the number of papers that the journal has published (924), by the number of editors (288). Predatory Journals: Who Publishes in Them and Why? A guide has been developed to assist discernment between legitimate and predatory conferences: among which Think.Check.Attend. K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., Arden, C., Balcom, L., Barros, T., Berger, M., Buitrago Ciro, J., Cugusi, L., Donaldson, M. R., Matthias, E., Graham, I. D., Hodgkinson, M., Khan, K. M., Mabizela, M., Manca, A., Milzow, K., Mouton, J., Muchenje, M., Olijhoek, T., Ommaya, A., Patwardhan, B., Poff, D., Proulx, L., Rodger, M., Severin, A., Strinzel, M., Sylos-Labini, M., Tamblyn, R., van Niekerk, M., Wicherts, J.M., Lalu, G. M. Predatory Journals: No Definition, No Defence, Predatory Publishing: An Emerging Threat to the Medical Literatura, Predatory Publishing Dilutes and Distorts Evidence in Systemactic Reviews, Payouts Push Professors towards Predatory Journals, From Excessive Journal Self-Cites to Citation Stacking: Analysis of Journal Self-Citation Kinetics in Search for Journals, Which Boost Their Scientometric Indicators, A Users Guide to Inflated and Manipulated Impact Factors, European Journal of Clinical Investigation, Article Processing Charge Hyperinflation and Price Insensitivity: An Open Access Sequel to the Serials Crisis, Predatory Journals and Dubious Publishers: How to Avoid Being Their Prey, Compliance with Ethical Rules for Scientific Publishing in Biomedical Open Access Journals Indexed in Journal Citation Reports, Evaluation of Untrustworthy Journals: Transition from Formal Criteria to a Complex View, Predatory Journals Enter Biomedical Databases through Public Funding, Questionning the Efficacy of Predatory Journals Blacklist, PubMed Should Rise the Bar for Journal Inclusin, The Surge of Predatory Open-Access in Neurosciences and Neurology, The Authors Respond to Rigorous Policies Ensure Integrity of NLM Literature Databases. (2019), so as to recognize predatory journals (and not to fall prey to them), it nevertheless omits an express reference to the quality of peer revision. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. We will only update links and add notes to this list. Poor Peer Review Practices. (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. The problem is that each of these criteria, above all if taken in an isolated way, are questionable and may occur singly or together in non-predatory journals. Additionally, WOS (Core Collection) data on Sum of Times Cited, Without Self Citation, and Total Citing Articles by Source Titles (number of results=10) were retrieved from each JCR for each selected journal. The results showed the average time from submission to first decision of JCR-indexed MDPI-journals was 19days, according to data provided in journals pages, section named Journal Statistics. The journal Sustainability has the largest Editorial Board with 1,145 members, while the journal Metabolites has a mere 62 Editorial Board members. A review of APCs for the leading journal control group was not conducted. Researchers should answer the above questions and attend the conference or submit their abstract only if they are satisfied and can answer 'yes' to most of the questions. The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) had 53 journals ranked in the 2018 JCRs annual report. 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). 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. BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. (2020) highlight, publishers could not explain not following best practices since there are settled by the industry principles for transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. The Author(s) 2021. 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). 2018). If our attention is focussed on the intra-MDPI citation rate trends between 2018 and 2019, we see that 46 out of the 53 journals increased their intra-MDPI citation rates. 2019), with those articles likely not to have undergone an acceptable editorial and peer-review process. The impact score (IS) 2021 of Frontiers in Oncology is 5.36, which is computed in 2022 as per its definition.Frontiers in Oncology IS is decreased by a factor of 0.3 and approximate percentage change is -5.3% when compared to preceding year 2020, which shows a falling trend. The author assumes responsibility for any error that may have arisen throughout the protracted, long-winded and at times somewhat artisanal data-collection process. 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. ), rather than professional editors (as with the journals of Nature Research). 2020b). 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. Research the editorial board 5. The first relevant fact of their analysis is that some journals use very similar names to other journals with established reputations, which can be one of the characteristics of predatory journals, with which they could be seen to prey upon those less well informed on the subject of predatory journals (Xia et al. Journal impact factors of MDPI-journals with and without self-citations (2018). MDPI founder and current president is Shu-Kun Lin, Ph.D (https://www.mdpi.com/about/team). 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. As mentioned above, MDPI reports state that the median time from submission to publication for all its 218 journals was 39days in 2019 (MDPI 2020) as it was in 2018 when MDPI published 203 journals (MDPI 2019). 2019), data show analysed journals have a completely different pattern in this matter when compared with leading journals in the category. Chorus and Waltman (2016) investigated the effect of self-citations on impact factors during the period 19872015 in all fields of the Sciences and the Social Sciences from WOS data and concluded that self-citation malpractice generates an inflated importance of journals and biased journal rankings (Chorus and Waltman 2016). I was not allowed to handle articles of authors who I'd worked with in the past (for some articles we brought in another editor we knew, for others Frontiers supplied a handling editor). (2019) highlighted the systematic for-profit publication behaviour (COPE 2019) and its prioritization of self-interest at the expense of scholarship (Grudniewicz et al. Check the journal's contact information 4. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals (edition 2018, released 2019) were selected for the analysis (53 out of 218). The COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME Principles for Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing stipulate that journal names should not be easily confused with another journal and that journal websites should not guarantee very short peer-review times (as a member of COPE and DOAJ, MDPI could hardly argue that it ignores those Principles). 2019), the term predatory journal is undoubtedly the most extensive in academia and appropriately describes this malpractice (Manca et al. Despite the fact that impact-factor manipulation may result in criminal liability according to Fong et al. 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. Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology is a broad-scope, interdisciplinary open-access journal, focusing on the fundamental processes of life, led by Prof Amanda Fisher and supported by a geographically diverse, high-quality editorial board. Read through past issues of the journal Think. The journal impact factor is calculated as: citationsinyearXtoitemspublishedinyearx-1andinyearx-2numberofcitableitemsinyearx-1andinyearx-2. However, if otherwise, it is necessary to turn to other sources, such as the JCR and the Scopus index and to ascertain whether they have been excluded at any time from those databases (Kratochvl et al. Its average APC amounts to 1,138USD (OMICS 2020). Furthermore, no less importantly, the analysis showed that a large number of the citations that they receive are from other MDPI-journals. The size of the editorial board is remarkably higher in all 53-MDPI journals analysed than in control leading journals. 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. 's (2019) definition. Frontiers in Oncology. In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. 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. Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark. 10 Point checklist to identify predatory publishers. At the same time, if there is a lack of awareness of predatory journals among scientists, then they will evaluate those publications as if they were legitimate and may naively send papers to predatory journals. In 2018, the case of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences and Sustainability, with self-citation rates several times higher than those of the leading journals within the same category stands out (a difference of 25.17% and 16.98%, respectively). 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. (https://thinkcheckattend.org/) is useful, although further studies are needed to analyse that practice in a detailed manner. Just in the same year 2007, the OA publisher Frontiers was . Thosusands of Australian Academics on the Editorial Boards of Journals Run by Predatory Publishers, Predatory Journals: What Are and How to Avoid Them, The Top-Ten in Journal Impact Factor Manipulation, Archivum Immunologiae et Therapiae Experimentalis, The Legal Consequences of Research Misconduct: False Investigators and Grant Proposals, Negative Effects of "Predatory" Journals on Global Health Research, Are Predatory Journals Undermining the Credibility of Science? Borrowing Martins (2016) terminology, self-citation and citation cartels are stratagems that may be applied to attempt to boost a Journal Impact Factor artificially. (2020)and in Scopus (Hedding 2019; Cortegiani et al. By 2019, 106,152 articles had been published in its 218 journals, an increase of 64.1% over 2018. 2019) and therefore jeopardize integrity in science. The physicist Ahmed Hindawi and his wife, the mathematician Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb, started their publishing house in their home country Egypt in 1997; 10 years later they converted Hindawi to open access. dhttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/materials-science/journals/fast-publication. Moreover, in January 2020, the number of special issues scheduled for 2020 with respect to those in 2019 skyrocketed in all the journals under study to levels as surprisingly high as 788 special issues in Sustainability, 830 in Applied Sciences, and 846 in Materials. 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. 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 APCs published on the journal web pages of the 53 journals under analysis imply that the articles published in 2019 could have generated an approximate income of 153,834,500 CHF (no APC-related waiver or discount could be considered in this calculation as no JCR-indexed journal provides relevant detailed information on the topic). 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). So, another aspect deserving further investigation are the impressive numbers of faculty staff on the Editorial Boards of MDPI-journals, above all if compared with the leading journals from each category. The use of JCR has been extended, both for the evaluation of academics and institutions of all types, legitimizing the journals that are indexed, which evaluate the publications included in scholarly records when taking decisions on promotion, tenure, grants, etc. Additionally, the constant and quite exceptional increase in the number of articles published in MDPI-journals between 2018 and 2019, reinforced by an exponential increase in the number of special issues, which easily outweigh the number of regular publications (above all in view of the previsions for 2020), together with an increase in APC fees could bring into question the status of MDPI as a publisher, at the very least because its APC-based business model alters the economic and scientific incentives in academic publishing (Siler 2020). These steps are particularly urgent for databases that already include MDPI-journals (WOS, PubMed and Scopus), since the defining features of predatory journals are that they systematize for profit publication (COPE 2019) and prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship (Grudniewicz et al. Frontiers in Oncology. Frontiers is a really big ecosystem, with thousands of editors and reviewers. In 2019, almost all 53 MDPI-journals under analysis had intra-MDPI citation rates well above 20% (all except Universe11.87% and Catalysts18.73%), reaching values as high as 56.94% in Electronics, 51.07% in the IJGI, 47.56% in Remote Sensing, and 46.55% in Sustainability (Table 3). Wikipedia lists various controversies about Frontiers articles and resignations of editors. ahttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/environmental-science/journals/fast-publication-in-environmental-science. The increase in the number of journals and articles published had no effect on time from submission to first decision. 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. Once accepted, time to posting the final word document online on a reputable journals Web site i.e. The COPE definition of predatory journals is no different in essence to the definition of Grudniewicz et al. 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. 2019; Strong 2019), because they undermine its integrity (Vogel 2017; Abad-Garca 2019), its quality, and its credibility (Bond et al. 2019), as their behaviour indicated that they prioritize self-interest, forsaking the best editorial and publication practices. Having completed the verification of the formal criteria, Kratochvl et al. This step is greatly facilitated when a journal operates with open peer review. These lists very soon become outdated and incomplete, especially if the resources to keep them updated are scarce. 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). Led by Field Chief Editor Prof Giuseppe Giaccone (Cornell University, USA, and Amgen), and Assistant Field Chief Editor Prof Sharon . Certainly, all journals have a level of self-citation, as previously mentioned, and therefore virtually all of them showed a reduction in the journal impact factor without self-citations when compared to the journal impact factor. 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. The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs. Scope. WOSPredatory Reports328Frontiers19951SCIE4SSCI223MDPI 422 ! 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). The impact score (IS), also denoted as Journal impact score (JIS), of an academic journal is a measure of the yearly . 2020) [italics added]. 2018) with all the consequences that may entail, not only at a scientific but at a social level. Rotten System. A review of the frequency of special issue publication in the control group was not conducted. Days from submission to first decision (median, minimum and maximum) of MDPI-journals. Henry and Kamila launched Frontiers with a vision to make science open, peer-review rigorous, transparent, and efficient and harness the power of technology to truly serve researchers' needs. 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. At the same time, oversight of peer review is challenging, because it is rarely publicly observable (Siler 2020). Title (s): Clinics in oncology. 2019). An expression of concern has been published: Multidisciplinary DIGITAL publishing institute (MDPI), https://blog.cabells.com/2020/06/08/announcement/, https://blog.cabells.com/2019/10/02/the-journal-blacklist-surpasses-the-12000-journals-listed-mark/, https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/534, https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/KanalForlagInfo.action?id=26778andbibsys=false, http://thinkepi.net/notas/crecs_2017/J_9_45_Cahue.pdf, https://www.nature.com/nature-research/about/journal-metrics, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/materials-science/journals/fast-publication, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/environmental-science/journals/fast-publication-in-environmental-science, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/computer-science/journals/fast-publication, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/mathematics/journals/fast-publication, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-control-and-signal-processing, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-mechanical-engineering, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-process-and-industrial-engineering, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/physics-and-astronomy/journals/fast-publication-in-physics, https://www.elsevier.com/life-sciences/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/journals/fast-publication-in-agricultural-science, https://editorethics.uncc.edu/editor-ethics-2-0-code/, https://help.incites.clarivate.com/incitesLiveJCR/JCRGroup/titleSuppressions.html, https://support.clarivate.com/ScientificandAcademicResearch/s/article/Journal-Citation-Reports-Explanation-of-Missing-Dropped-or-Suppressed-Journals?language=en_US, https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/OmKriterier.action, https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/VedtakNiva2, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/us-judge-rules-deceptive-publisher-should-pay-501-million-damages, https://publicationethics.org/files/cope_dd_a4_pred_publishing_nov19_screenaw.pdf, https://www.omicsonline.org/article-processing-charges.php, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Expression of concern: Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), Correction to: Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH)/, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (IJGI)/, International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS)/, Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (JMSE)/, 13.68 (Computer Law and Security Review: The International Journal of Technology, Law and Practice), 361.83 (Computer Standards and Interfaces), 24.15 (International Journal of Machine Tools and Manufacture), 198.1 (Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing), 41.58 (Case Studies in Thermal Engineering), 324.45 (International Journal of Pressure Vessels and Piping), 26.39 (International Journal of Engineering Science), 104.51 (Journal of Chemical Health and Safety), 142.17 (Journal of Computational Physics), 8.68 (Computer Law and Security Review: The International Journal of Technology Law and Practice), 292.39 (Computer Standards and Interfaces), 196.56 (Applied Mathematics and Computation), 123.48 (International Journal of Mineral Processing), 18.97 (International Journal of Machine Tools and Manufacture), 118.16 (International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics), 29.96 (Case Studies in Thermal Engineering), 271.53 (International Journal of Pressure Vessels and Piping), 23.03 (International Journal of Engineering Science), 64.12 (Computers and Chemical Engineering). 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