All of the journals published by MDPI have now been placed on a predatory publishers list:
https://predatoryreports.org/news/f/list-of-all-mdpi-predatory-publications
The article gives their evidence for this decision.

Personally, I've avoided MDPI, and recommended early career colleagues to do the same (not always successfully). Then, a few weeks ago, a collaborator resubmitted a paper that I was a coauthor on to an MDPI journal without asking me first. Rather than ask to be removed, I had first-hand experience of the publishing process.

In short, my experience was there were some excellent reviewer comments. But you could ignore some (maybe many) and get published. Which to me, invalidates the review process. IMO (and it seems many others) it confirms that the publishers want your open access fee over good science.

The paper that I am a coauthor on was accepted, and at least I could advise my senior author to make sure they did the best job possible in improving the paper through the 'review process'. I suspect you could make all sorts of changes at this stage and there would be no come back (no, we didn't try this). We had numerous missed 'deadline' emails from the journal, followed by very prompt invoicing.

My experience mirrors the examples in the article. I have yet to review for MDPI and do not plan to do so, and I will continue to recommend colleagues to publish elsewhere.

#academia #publishing #science #predatoryjournals #openaccess