#mdpi

@rmounce Should #MDPI be considered a Scopus competitor? They sure try.
https://www.scilit.com/

Endspurt: Noch bis Freitag läuft eine NRW-weite Umfrage zur Qualität einiger wissenschaftlicher Verlage: https://www.ulb.uni-muenster.de/fachblog/archiv/9003
Wir wünschen uns zahlreiche Teilnahmen, um unsere Überlegungen zu Services v.a. rund um #OpenAccess weiter verbessern zu können!
#DeGruyter #Elsevier #Frontiers #MDPI #SpringerNature #TaylorFrancis #Wiley

@tg9541

I'd call Levin "one of the worst.". Master-bullshitter. A sign of the times: even in science, it is mainly shamelessness that will get you noted and promoted these days.

And he *will* get this published, even if it's in one of these shitty #MDPI spam journals he likes so much.

There is system behind this apparent madness. And it works like a charm in these deluded times. People crave a optimist "visionary."

Steve Bannon, on the other hand, calls it "flooding the zone with shit."

Ukrainian universities are racing up the #QS Rankings, but at what cost? More papers, less quality, and a science system stuck in a loop of self-citations and #MDPI binge-publishing:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05165-2

#Rankings turn means into ends: publishing is no longer about advancing knowledge but climbing charts. Ukrainian universities show how chasing #metrics can derail true academic impact. Can we rethink the system before it’s too late?

#journals #university #scientometrics

Call for Papers for IDEAS 2025.
Location: School of Computing at Newcastle University
When: 14ᵗʰ - 16ᵗʰ of July, 2025

Submission Deadline: 15ᵗʰ of May, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: 13ᵗʰ of June, 2025

The annual IDEAS conference is a top international forum for data engineering researchers, practitioners, developers, and application users to explore revolutionary ideas and results and exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. We invite the participation of all interested in this event, which provides insight into original research contributions relating to all aspects of #databaseengineering defined broadly, and particularly topics of emerging interest describing work on integrating new #technologies into #products and #applications, on experiences with existing and novel techniques, and on the identification of unsolved #challenges.

For the time being, we will have the honour of presenting an invited talk by Jim Webber from Neo4j, and we will also have an #EDI session organized by Laura Heels, so do not miss this! I will update you all via my social media for new exciting updates.

More information concerning the CfP can be found on the Conference Website: https://lnkd.in/dEFJ8dGZ. We are also welcoming Sponsoring Opportunities for companies, for which do not hesitate to contact me (more information on: https://lnkd.in/dPbu7H27)

Selected papers will be invited to an #MDPI Information Special Issue (https://lnkd.in/dXrM-zhE).

So, what are you waiting for? Plan ahead for your next paper. I hope to see you all soon in Newcastle!!!

#databases #bigdata #datamining #informationsystems #verifiedartificialintelligence #xai

@deevybee
Oh wow! Thanks for this.

"Finland had downgraded its classification of 187 MDPI journals because of evidence of "minimum time spend for editorial work and quality assessment", at the same time that German universities had secured a national publishing agreement with MDPI"

Why did German universities deal with #MDPI ? I thought its obviously #predatory and not be given anything

@babelcarp Yeah, they're a really shady publisher, although that doesn't necessarily mean everything they publish is junk. I have personal bad experience as a reviewer for #MDPI. It was a paper on cold stress in tea and they used Anji Bai Cha, which as you probably know, is a cold temperature "albino" cultivar. I commented that the authors should limit the scope of their conclusions since that is such an odd cultivar and they responded by *removing all mention of what cultivar they used*

I hate that this is in an #MDPI journal, but I'm still excited to read this! Moving to the top of my pile of #tea papers to read: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/1/133

A committee of scholars in #Finland has decided to downgrade 271 #journals from #Frontiers and #MDPI in their #quality rating system, in a move that may discourage researchers from submitting manuscripts to the outlets.

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/12/24/finland-publication-forum-will-downgrade-hundreds-of-frontiers-and-mdpi-journals/

#research #publishing #highered #highereducation #qualitycontrol #scholcomm #universities #transparency #OpenAccess

I just got two pieces of #spam in one week from _Medical Sciences_, an #MDPI journal. The first invited me to submit an article and offered me a discount on its #APC. The second nagged me for not responding to the first.

I'm not a medical researcher. My fields are philosophy, law, and open access. This is easy to discover in a simple web search.

If this medical journal knows my fields, then why is it soliciting an article from me? If it doesn't know my fields, then why is it soliciting an article from me?

Does it realize that its emails prove that it's spamming researchers at random without knowing the first thing about them?

I'm sure you get this kind of spam too. When you find time, I urge you to post about it and name names.

I don't do this often enough. Here are two earlier examples.
* July 2017
https://web.archive.org/web/20180801143629/https://plus.google.com/+PeterSuber/posts/CcyhJ7NudEh
* June 2018
https://web.archive.org/web/20180801143627/https://plus.google.com/+PeterSuber/posts/6DfDZABMNSv

“You reap what you sow. On average, publications from #MDPI may be less complex, but there is also a lot of nonsense from the other publishers (#Elsevier, #Wiley, #Springer, etc.) MDPI is unbeatably fast. When you consider that feedback from other publishers sometimes takes over 12 months (not because there are so many iterations, but because there is no feedback) and we are constantly forced to publish quickly […], MDPI simply takes advantage of the system we have created.”

Die Ergebnisse unserer anonymen Umfrage unter Forscher*innen der #TUHamburg sprechen gegen eine vertiefende Kooperation mit dem Publisher #MDPI.
Daher verzichten wir auf eine Teilnahme am "Gold Open Access Agreement 2025-2026."

https://www.tub.tuhh.de/blog/2024/12/19/publizieren-mit-mdpi-ergebnisse-unserer-umfrage/

An interesting study on the percentage of Eurpean #openacccess publications in #MDPI journals. There are significant differences between counties and a clear correlation with the rank of the University.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06282

Need something to read as you digest all that turkey? Noted kaiju historian William Tsutsui writes about GODZILLA MINUS ONE and its complicated relationship to both the original GOJIRA and the real post-war Japan. #MDPI Humanities #openaccess #horror #kaiju
https://doi.org/10.3390/h13060158

@gkalinkat @SciMag

To clarify: I think these #mdpi #frontiers #SciRep should be treated as #preprints. I agree there are some really good preprints!

Regarding options for #openreview publishing, there's now @PeerCommunityIn and @PeerCommunityJournal for many fields!

@SciMag is alarmed that low quality articles are flawing #SystematicReviews.

One solution is to only include studies that are in #opendata.

Another is to ignore #predatory and journals in the "gray zone" (e.g. all #MDPI, #Frontiers, #ScientificReports, etc.) as we already do in evaluation committees.

https://www.science.org/content/article/systematic-reviews-aim-extract-broad-conclusions-many-studies-are-peril

@rmounce I loved the idea of Molecules: one molecule, one collection of experimental data, along with a narrative

But the scope of the journal changed to something more traditional, unfortunately :(

#mdpi #chemistry

Our dialogue with Vasyl Cernat regarding Romania's evaluation reform continues in the pages of #Scientometrics. Dr. Cernat argues that MDPI’s practices - such as inflated impact factors, an abundance of special issues, low rejection rates, and rapid manuscript processing times - raise questions about the quality of publications:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05187-w

#ImpactFactor #ResearchPolicy #ResearchFunding #MDPI #journals #Romania

#CallForPapers! Dr. Christoph Jörges is guest editor of a special issue on “Machine Learning for Applications in Agriculture and Vegetation Using Remote Sensing” in the #MDPI journal #RemoteSensing Submit by March 25, 2025!

Find more info on the special issue's topic and submission details on our blog: https://www.geo.lmu.de/geographie/en/latest-news/news-overview/news/call-for-papers-for-a-special-issue-of-the-journal-remote-sensing.html

#researchnews #cfp #sustainability #climatechange #research #academia #geonews #gischat

Nukes & flowers & laser-beam powers, that's what little Godzillas are made of. #MDPI Humanities' special kaiju issue now has an essay on the posthumanist hybridization of Godzilla 'n' pals. #openaccess #kaiju Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns / Emiliano Aguilar / Jorge Eduardo Traversa
https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050139