2019). It is therefore essential to define the concept not to solely rely on specific criteria. 2019; Strong 2019), because they undermine its integrity (Vogel 2017; Abad-Garca 2019), its quality, and its credibility (Bond et al. It should be pointed out that, despite the significant advance in the definition proposed by Grudniewicz et al. 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). Stop This Waste of People, Animals and Money, Analysis of Citation Patterns and Impact of Predatory Sources in the Nursing Literature, Ingreasing Awareness about Predatory Publishers, Journal of the American Psychiatric New Association, Readers Beware! IMR Press All research efforts deserve support and recognition IMR Press is a publisher of open access peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences journals. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals in (2018) and ranking/leading journal in the category. Predatory Journals Are Infiltrating Citation Databases, Potential Predatory and Legitimate Biomedical Journals: Can You Tell the Difference? Due to the breadth of MDPI journals assessed in this paper it was not possible to conduct in-depth work to compare each journal. 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). Its average APC amounts to 1,138USD (OMICS 2020). The average increase in the number of published articles was 148.93%. It is necessary to point out that the conclusions of this work must be assessed in the light of its limitations that likewise offer opportunities for new research work. 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. The formal criteria together with the analysis of the citation patterns of the 53 journals under analysis all suggest they may be predatory journals. Similar pernicious effects can be expected from citation stacking when journals cite each other to raise their impact factors (Heneberg 2016). Frontiers 2019 Frontiers Media 2020 Frontiers Media 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. In the case of the journal having been included in JCR, the analysis of non-standard citation practices of the journal (a significant increase or fall in the number of citations, self-citations, and articles and majority of citations form a small group of journals) is of great relevance (Kratochvl et al. Stay away from Frontiers. However, they've done a pretty good job maintaining reputation, though it certainly differs per-journal. The journal welcomes submissions on a wide spectrum of cell and developmental biology . [ This is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, America's leading higher . Their new found legitimacy means that any citations will, in consequence, raise the productivity metrics (e.g. According to the MDPI Annual Report 2019 (MDPI 2020), these 218 journals are supported by 67,207 editors (an increase of 55.78% over 2018) with a median time from submission to publication of 39days (as it was in 2018) and APCs ranging from 300 to 2,000 CHF (1 Swiss Franc is approximately equal to 0.92 Euros) with a median of 1.525 CHF. First, a proper systematic and structured overview of APC rates it is not available. The most prominent and prestigious journals in a scientific field are promoted to Level 2 (publishing 20% of the literature in that field) (https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/VedtakNiva2). I don't see Frontiers as predatory. In any case, the first step towards identifying predatory journals is to have a clear definition for their definitive identification. 1. 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. 2020). Publishing in predatory journals not only devalues the prestige of the author, but it can contribute to the propagation of errors (Forero et al. In some cases, where an MDPI-journal was indexed in more than one JCR category, the non-MDPI-journal with the highest impact factor was chosen for comparison. Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed open access scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. 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. (2020)and in Scopus (Hedding 2019; Cortegiani et al. All the more so, if it is taken into account that, in addition, the editorial staff of MDPI is formed of researchers who have to organize their time for revision among their other professional activities (research, teaching, dissemination, evaluation, grant applications, etc. The didactic explanation of Broome was as follows: The speed to publication for reputable journals is certainly longer with time from submission to first decision by the editor ranging from 4 to 12 weeks for most journals and varies even by article. In concrete, great variability may be appreciated between the maximum and minimum review durations of its journals within different fields with regard to the speed of the review process, understood as the average duration from submission to the final editorial decision (including first decision-accept, reject or revise) (https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/materials-science/journals/fast-publication). (, Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Number of special issues of MDPI-journals (2018, 2019 and 2020). Poor Peer Review Practices. 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 Siler (2020) stated since APC-based OA publishing involves remunerating publishers based on how many articles they publish, this can underpin perverse incentives to accept as many articles as possible to maximize revenue, so predatory journals operate in such a manner, eschewing legitimate peer review or other types of quality control (p. 1386) and prompting an excessive publication of articles, often of inferior quality (Siler 2020). (2020). A Cross-Sectional Comparison, Predatory Open Access: A Longitudinal Study of Article Volumes and Market Charateristics, Is It Such a Big Deal? The increase in APCs was qualified as hyperinflation by Khoo (2019) and was not exclusive 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, he found overall APC rises in all of them ranging between 17% and 220% and, likewise, observed a rise in the number of articles per journal. Eigengrad 3 yr. ago. On this point, the definitions of predatory journals of both COPE (2019) and Grudniewicz et al. 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. Division of Medical Oncology, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. 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. Predatory journals, harmful to academia and science, sow confusion, promote shoddy scholarship and waste resources (Grudniewicz et al. Scope. (2020) in the complex evaluation of a journal, to which another two must be added: combining objectively verifiable criteria with analysis of a journals content and knowledge of the journals background (p.1). Logically, this step requires expert knowledge in each scientific field that prevents a global analysis of the 53 journals under analysis. Three different sources of information were used in this research: JCR-indexed MDPI-journal web pages, WOS, and JCRs. In addition, publication in a predatory journal implies the possible squandering of valuable resources: people, animals, and money, as Moher et al. 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. We will only update links and add notes to this list. Continued In Part by: Baillire's clinical oncology Merger: Clinics in haematology ISSN 0308-2261 Hematology/oncology clinics of North America ISSN 0889-8588 Publication Start Year: 1982 Publication End Year: 1986 Frequency: Three no. Frontiers in Oncology is a broad-scope, multidisciplinary journal covering all areas of cancer research to advance our knowledge of cancer epidemiology to improve diagnosis, therapeutics and management strategies. The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is owned by the German publishing house Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which is also the partial owner of Frontiers. Intra-MDPI citation rate 2018 and 2019 (top 10 citing journals). The number of special issues was over twice the number of ordinary issues in 92.45% of the MDPI-journals under analysis. Check the journal's contact information 4. Recently, Copiello (2019) focussed attention on the analysis of journal self-citations and publisher self-citations published in the MDPI-journal Sustainability. We aim to facilitate the dissemination of high-quality research in the area of biomedical science. Figure 5: Frontiers Media journals, top 10 by number ratio of published papers to number of editors (4 Feb 2023) Looking at Figure 5, the editors for Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, on average, has handled 3.21 papers. Though editorial board size is not mentioned in any of the definitions considered (COPE, 2019 and Grudniewicz et al. Conflict of interest statement. The extent to which predatory journals can harm scientific practice increases as the numbers of such journals expand, in so far as they undermine scientific integrity, quality, and credibility, especially if those journals leak into prestigious databases. However, this solution could only work in the medium to long term. 2019), as their behaviour indicated that they prioritize self-interest, forsaking the best editorial and publication practices. Cukier et al. Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research across the entire field of cancer research. Aurora, United States. because it is used as a proxy for both quality and integrity. Certainly, the number of special issues published or scheduled in 1 year reveals no quality-related information, although the fact that the number of special issues in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals is so much higher than the number of ordinary issues per year coupled with their constant increase since 2018 inevitably awakens suspicions of a lucrative business aim. The author highlights the 'exponential growth' of predatory journals, stating that 'The alarming increase in the number of predatory journals (from 1,800 to 8,000 over the period 2010-4) 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 None declared. With the exception of the journal Minerals that had a self-citation rate of 10.75% in 2018, compared to 12.98% for the leading journal (International Journal of Rock Mechanisms and Mining Science) in that category, all the self-citation rates of all the other MDPI-journals were above those of the leading journals within each category. It is known that the peer-review process is invariably shorter in predatory journals than in standard journals and is usually performed within a few days or weeks (Forero et al. 2019), data show analysed journals have a completely different pattern in this matter when compared with leading journals in the category. In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. These journals are analysed, not only to contrast the formal criteria for the identification of predatory journals, but taking a step further, their background is also analysed with regard to self-citations and the source of those self-citations in 2018 and 2019. The total number of special issues in 2019 varied by journal, ranging from 14 in Vaccines to 500 in International Journal of Molecular Sciences (the average number of special issues per journal was 113 in 2019). 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. The results serve to point out how self-citation rates and intra-MPDI citation rates both followed a rise between 2018 and 2019. ghttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-process-and-industrial-engineering. 2020) for inclusion in an objective definition. As such a single proxy was used in the form of the non-MDPI leading journal. As a control group for comparison with JCR-indexed MDPI-journals, the top ranked journal by Impact Factor in each relevant subject category were selected (all under the joint name of non-MDPI-journals in this study) (Table 1). Published by Oxford University Press. 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). 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. In addition, it is highly unusual to have an article accepted without revisions. Field Chief Editor Heike Wulff at UC Davis is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. Related Infographic. (https://thinkcheckattend.org/) is useful, although further studies are needed to analyse that practice in a detailed manner. https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/principles-transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing. In 2019, 137 from among its 218 journals were indexed in Web of Science (WOS) (in Science Citation Index Expanded, Emerging Sources Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index) (MDPI 2020). (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. 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. As an approximation and with the limitations that it might imply in general terms, that time can be evaluated by comparing it with the review metrics from Nature Research 2019 (https://www.nature.com/nature-research/about/journal-metrics), which show that the average number of days from submission to acceptance fluctuated between 81days (Nature Structural and Molecular Biology) and 258days (Nature Neuroscience). Even so, the identification of predatory journals is still a crucial aspect in the maintenance of quality and scientific integrity. The Author(s) 2021. 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. The results showed that the self-citation rates increased and was very much higher than those of the leading journals in the JCR category. Frederic was setting up a new, online, open access, peer reviewed . B., Brown S. D., Stewart D. W., Roane D. S., Harirforoosh S. (, Cortegiani A., Manca A., Lalu M., Moher D. (, Cortegiani A., Ippolito M., Ingoglia G., Manca A., Cugusi L., Severin A., Strinzel M., Panzarella V., Campisi G., Manoj L., Gregoretti C., Einav S., Moher D., Giarratano A. 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). 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. Wikipedia lists various controversies about Frontiers articles and resignations of editors. Such journals possess borderline, uncertain, contested and/or ambiguous legitimacy. Field Chief Editor Giuseppe Giaccone at Georgetown University is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. The promotion of questionable special issues is one of the identifying characteristics of predatory journals (Alrawadieh 2020). Journal impact factors of MDPI-journals with and without self-citations (2018). In summary: 1 researchers should neither send papers for their publication, nor cite them, nor act as reviewers for them, nor form part of their editorial committees; 2 research institutions should inform researchers of the reality of predatory journals and their iniquitous consequences at an individual and general level; and, 3 evaluation agencies and committees should ignore the registers that refer to predatory journals. 2020). MDPI founder and current president is Shu-Kun Lin, Ph.D (https://www.mdpi.com/about/team). 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. Assistant Field Chief Editor. 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. Ramn y Cajal. Field Chief Editor Giuseppe Giaccone at Georgetown University is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. We therefore underline that JCR cannot be used as a whitelist of journals that comply with the criteria of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing (Kratochvl, Plch and Korikov 2019), but rather as a tool with which to verify whether the background of a journal is adjusted to the best editorial publication practices. 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. The number of articles published during 2019 appeared to have no effect on the average duration of peer review. Predatory journals usually offer rapid peer-review processes, but without experts reviewing the quality of research and accuracy of the information (Oerman et al. In my opinion, Frontiers journals are only modestly predatory. The journal Nature recently published a definition of the predatory journal (Grudniewicz et al. The aim of this investigation is to assess whether the subset of MDPI-journals that are indexed in JCR fit various criteria used in some definitions of a predatory journal. 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