Talk:MDPI/Archive 5

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Times Higher Education article

A new article dated March 15 may be a useful reference. ScienceFlyer (talk) 07:08, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

This is a very good article. It perfectly captures the issues people have with MDPI, and how its business model works. Kenji1987 (talk) 08:02, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Great addition that should be added to bolster some citations that are possibly debateable in quality. For instance: nice that it uses the figure from the Crosetto blog, which I added previously as an expert WP:SPS. Lends that decision further credibility beyond its notoriety as a high-profile analysis of MDPI. -- Crawdaunt (talk) 10:33, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

The article is paywalled. What does it say? Banedon (talk) 10:45, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

• If you register (free), you get a number of articles for free each month, I could read this article that way. --Randykitty (talk) 12:07, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Not sure about copy/pasting the whole article (bypassing paywall and pasting an article to Wikipedia in any form seems... sketchy). But here are snippets:

The Swiss open access publisher MDPI has rejected criticisms that its rapid expansion of journal “special issues” poses a threat to quality, despite having almost 56,000 such issues receiving submissions this year.

...

While some scholars have praised its rapid turnaround of papers (with a median submission-to-publication window of 38 days) and its transparency (22 per cent of articles use open peer review), it has faced questions over its use of special issues – for which journals invite scholars to propose and run publications on distinct themes, with submissions remaining open for months.

...

In addition to concerns about how peer review can be conducted effectively at this scale, questions have been raised about the relevance of some special issues to the journal’s main theme: one Sustainability special issue on “gender issues in sport and leisure”, which closed last year, included papers on doping in sport and how anxiety levels in female Chinese PhD students were affected by “funny running”.

...

Focusing on 98 MDPI journals with an impact factor, there were 55,985 special issues with a closing date in 2023, as of 23 February, Dr Crosetto told Times Higher Education. That compares with 39,587 open special issues identified at the end of March 2021, although only 10,504 of these eventually published anything. In 2022, 17,777 special issues published content.

[FIGURE FROM CROSETTO BLOG]

Number of MDPI open special issues per year. Source: Paolo Crosetto, scraped from MDPI website

Source: Paolo Crosetto

...

While Dr Crosetto did not begrudge MDPI’s success, its growth raised questions about both demand and quality, he said. “Sustainability sports 3,512 open special issues – this is just shy of 10 per day. If each special issue plans to host six to 10 papers, this is 60 to 100 papers per day. At some point, you are bound to touch a limit – there possibly aren’t that many papers around,” he said.

Cheers

-- Crawdaunt (talk) 11:47, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. To be honest, my first reaction was laughter, because the description closely matches my experience with MDPI. The idea that there aren't enough papers around is also interesting, and the first time I've seen it. I would nonetheless like to see this elaborated on because it's obvious that the number of papers published every year worldwide is increasing (c.f. [1]), and furthermore some articles are written because they are invited articles and would not have existed otherwise.

However, I cannot see how we can make use of this article as a source, unless it's as a source for rapid turnaround, open peer review, and how a substantial number of special issues have not published anything. Maybe in the History section? Banedon (talk) 01:29, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

I think the biggest take-away is that MDPI's business model is primarily based on the special-issue model, which confuses a lot of people, as it makes publishing less exclusive, and more accessible (though we should not confuse them for anything else but a commercial company whose prime interest is making profit). The fact that Crosetto mentions that there aren't enough papers around clearly higlights this. Yes, there aren't enough papers within Western universities, but the rest of the world has plenty of papers to publish. Oviedo-Garcia's problematic paper on MDPI states that a characteristic of a predatory journal is: "predominance of editorial board members from developing countries", which fits into this presumption as well. But anyway to keep things short: we could add, MDPI has been criticised for its special-issues model (add that they had 54,000 special issues are so), which some scholars argue might jeopordize the quality of peer review, whereas MDPI contended that it does not. Kenji1987 (talk) 11:42, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

IMO this is just a better reference than some of the current references on the page per Wikipedia standards on referencing. e.g. one can now cite the Crosetto blogpost as the primary source, and this THE as the affirming reference that shows that blogpost is written by a subject expert. -- Crawdaunt (talk) 21:06, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Interestingly, Jeffrey Beall wrote about MDPI special issues in 2015. ScienceFlyer (talk) 22:35, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Aye, whole section on Beall's list within article as MDPI was a major subject surrounding that controversial list. Crawdaunt (talk) 08:05, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Clarivate de-lists MDPI flagship journal

See the announcement post by Clarivate here: https://clarivate.com/blog/supporting-integrity-of-the-scholarly-record-our-commitment-to-curation-and-selectivity-in-the-web-of-science/ And MDPI's response here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/5536

Among the ~50 journals dropped from Web of Science is the MDPI flagship journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) and Journal of Risk and Financial Management (JRFM). In other words, IJERPH and JRFM can no longer have an impact factor...

Don't really know how this fits into the page yet (this is quite a big move by Web of Science/Clarivate), but thought I'd bring this info to the awareness of the page. IJERPH began in 2004 and among the largest journal of MDPI by publication output, also being 2nd only to Scientific Reports in terms of total journal article output among biomedicine-related journals (see: https://scontent-lhr8-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/337128097_3317100025267257_2316774039826351253_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_p526x296&_nc_cat=1&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5cd70e&_nc_ohc=HmJUS2hW_4UAX9nQQka&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr8-2.xx&oh=00_AfDHGh-avvYdAWg4-tAAEEVH4eY6VV2c9ACrNPPm6MNLRg&oe=64238754).

Big news. -- Crawdaunt (talk) 15:19, 24 March 2023 (UTC) - edited

New article from Science. ScienceFlyer (talk) 21:12, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

• For a related issue, see the history of Symmetry (journal). --Randykitty (talk) 12:29, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't see anything in that article that is relevant? Banedon (talk) 00:28, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

• You have to look in the history, two IPs insist on adding this issue to the article on the journal, even though the sources don't mention this journal. I've put a "see also" link to the relevant section here, but some extra eyes of people who have thought more about this issue than I myself are welcome. --Randykitty (talk) 05:56, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Oh, you're referring to the history of the Wikipedia page. I thought it was the history of the journal, and my comment reflected there being no history section in that article. Considering the claim the source is supporting is "[Symmetry's] scientific quality is considered as poor by many institutions and mathematicians", I think Igor Pak is fine as a source, but I've not read the source, and furthermore any criticism of MDPI should clearly be in this article and not the one on Symmetry. Banedon (talk) 08:27, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Corrections published in Oviedo-García's Research Evaluation article

Link to paper [2]. It looks like a correction has been published. The correction says "The original version of this article has been retracted and a revised version has been published as a replacement, addressing concerns about conclusions drawn in the article. The conclusions in the updated article are reached based on cited sources." Does anyone know if the version given in the first link is the corrected paper? If the first link is the original uncorrected paper, where can I find the corrected paper? If it is the corrected paper, where can I find the changes? Banedon (talk) 09:48, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeah they did something weird there... Normally a doi is a permanent identifier and a correction is a separate doi. Here they've removed the original and not even left a statement of what was changed... Very odd for a journal whose purpose is "Research Evaluation". I could, in fact, find the original article (thanks RetractionWatch, below). There's a web archived version here.

RetractionWatch report on a few changes and even provide a Microsoft Word document where they did a Track Changes comparison between the original and the revised version. Note: my browser said "this cannot be downloaded securely," but... I guess I live life on the edge as I did it anyways >: ) If you want to do the same, see the "(See a comparison we created here.)" line in the RetractionWatch page above.

My quickie scan says the new version has ~1000 fewer words than the original. I see many edits toning language down, changing from "are in fact" to "could be considered" etc... or large blocks of text to tone down conclusions. Ex:

ADDED: "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. Due to the breadth of MDPI journals assessed in this paper it was not possible to conduct in-depth work to compare each journal. As such a single proxy was used in the form of the non-MDPI leading journal. However, since these journals are all the top journals by Impact Factor in their respective subject categories it is not possible to know whether the differences observed between the two groups are meaningful, a wider sample is necessary to draw definitive conclusions." <- toned down conclusion

But some changes seem to actually just buckle down and reinforce previous conclusions:

ADDED: "Regarding journal names, aforementioned Principles state they “shall be unique and not be one that is easily confused with other journal or might mislead potential authors and readers about the journal’s origin or association with other journals”. 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." <- reinforced conclusion

Cheers,

--Crawdaunt (talk) 05:50, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

I added a section on this to the article. I didn't add Giulia Stefelleni's criticism of the revised article, but that could reasonably be added too. Banedon (talk) 01:23, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Added the special issue thing. That's what stood out from this paper to me. 800+ special issue per year is nuts. There's no way a fulltime EiC could even keep track of the emails involved with that number of issues. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:04, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Not a fan of the section for several reasons. First, it's not the thrust of the paper (it's not given in the abstract). Second, I don't see why you can't have 800+ special issues per year. Sure, a single EiC cannot keep track of all the emails involved with that many special issues, but that's why special issues have guest editors. It does imply that the EiC is not the person setting up the SI, but that doesn't say anything about the peer review of the SI papers. More pragmatically the only cited criticism of the SIs is by Jack Grove, but the criticism doesn't make sense: there are millions of articles published every year (Elsevier alone for example publishes more papers than MDPI) so it's clearly possible to conduct peer review on this scale. Finally if the number of SIs is a concern, then the section is in the wrong place; it should be a subsection within the "Evaluation and controversies" section. If it the number of SIs is not a concern, then the section is COATRACKed. If kept, I would move it to the History section, mention that at some point MDPI adopted the SI model (which also drove growth at Hindawi & Frontiers), and leave out Jack Grove's "criticism" (if it can be called criticism, since he only raised questions). Banedon (talk) 03:56, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

There are a million of Elsevier articles accross thousands of articles, on their regular schedule. When your journal has 12 regular issues, and 3000 special issues, something is amiss. This is both something odd (it doesn't have to be the focus of the Oviedo-García, but it is something she points out as extraordinary), and something criticized. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:01, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't see anything amiss with that. You can't do it with a hybrid or subscription journal (your subscription prices would be thrown out of whack, plus you can't exactly print an issue with 0-1 papers for physical reasons), but there's no fundamental reason an open access journal can't do it. Oviedo-Garcia's paper doesn't focus on SIs - it doesn't for example discriminate between self-citations from SI papers and non-SI papers - so it's at best a tangential source. I remain opposed to leaving the section as it is and prefer my edit described above. Banedon (talk) 04:11, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

@Crawdaunt: wondering what you think about the above (also curious what other watchers of this article think). Banedon (talk) 06:32, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

This is no longer about the Oviedo section, but rather this new subsection called proliferation of special issues?

I think that's been a topic in news before, and Oviedo comments on it certainly. This is currently built in as the last small paragraph of the History section, citing refs [7][8], although perhaps the following might be a good reference in addition to [8] as a way to legitimize [7] as an authority analysis: https://www.science.org/content/article/fast-growing-open-access-journals-stripped-coveted-impact-factors

Actually... I now realize this section is re-citing refs [7][8] again as refs 100+.

That all said, I don't think this deserves the current heading status. I think there could be a discussion about this being its own subsection within controversies? But also it's a bit redundant with what's already in the history section. Maybe the solution there is to remove this from the History section into its own controversy subheading?

As it is, there's a weird focus on Oviedo-Garcia, who was one of many who identified this, but the in-depth analysis in ref [7] by Crosetto really started that whole conversation in Oviedo-Garcia, and gave rise to the recent articles in Times Higher Education and Sciencemag on the topic. Crawdaunt (talk) 14:47, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

There's no focus on OG, we just report what they did. If Crosetto precedes OG, then we should start with Crosetto. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:43, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Expanded with Crosetto. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:26, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Better in terms of balance, but I would say this is currently much longer than it ought to be, and again I'd merge it into the controversies section above as a subsection rather than give it its own section heading. I might also remove the last paragraph of the History section and port it to this new section. I'd actually say that's a better starting point than providing a full 4 short paragraphs on the topic...

This is a WP:DUE concern. Just because one can write further on something doesn't mean one should. The length of a section should be balanced with its overall importance to the present article. MDPI does have a high use of Special Issues, and that's a relevant controversial topic... But it's not more important than every other controversy covered, so to make it 2x as long and also under its own section header is a bit much.

Answering from phone atm so can look this over later to make edits in-line with my feedback if those aren't made already. Crawdaunt (talk) 17:54, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

I don't buy the length/due argument. It's also a rather bad fit in the 'controversies' section as it stands, given those are all about individual events, while this one is systematic. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:23, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

@Banedon, thoughts? Crawdaunt (talk) 20:06, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

It's a good point that this is no longer related to the Oviedo-Garcia section, but rather about special issues; accordingly, I will start a new section on this talk page. Banedon (talk) 03:20, 2 August 2023 (UTC)