Stay away from Frontiers. The limitations of the available resources have meant that the analysis has been restricted to the behaviour of MDPI-journals in JCR over 2 years, 2018 and 2019, as well as the information available for 2020 in January 2020. Both the increases in APC and the number of articles and special issues in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals may raise questions about the practices in use and their potential fit to these definitions. Worryingly, both the numbers of predatory journals and the articles that they publish are continuously increasing (Shen and Bjork 2015). On the Cost of Journal Use in the Digital Era, Demarcating Spectrums of Predatory Publishing: Economic and Institutional Sources of Academic Legitimacy, Journal of Association for Information Science and Technology, A Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Understanding Quality in Research: Avoiding Predatory Journals, Excessively Long Editorial Decisions and Excessiveley Long Publication Times by Journals: Causes, Risks, Consequences, and Proposed Solutions, Predatory Journals Authors and Readers Beware, Researchers May Be Part of the Problem in Predatory Publishing, The Influence of Editorial Decisions and the Academic Network on Self-Citations and Journal Impact Factors, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Thechnology. Editorial Board size and self-citation rates (2018, 2019). Predatory Journals: Who Publishes in Them and Why? In particular, the 400 or so conferences that MDPI sponsored in 2019 (MDPI 2020) should all be carefully scrutinized. 6 ways to spot a Predatory Journal: 1. We aim to facilitate the dissemination of high-quality research in the area of biomedical science. MDPI founder and current president is Shu-Kun Lin, Ph.D (https://www.mdpi.com/about/team). Number of articles published by MDPI-journals (2018 and 2019). A review of content output in the leading journals was not conducted. 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. So, the total time to print publication can be 68 months by the time the authors revise the article and the editor and reviewers decide if the revisions are acceptable. Deceptive or scamming journals are also the other name of the . 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. This may suggest a form of post-production misconduct, due to the manipulation of citations, which affects the impact factor of the journal, its visibility and its influence. Elsevier provided a framework to assess time from submission to first decision in relative terms (Table 5). 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 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. 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. However, the reality is that this process is by no means simple, as Aromataris and Stern (2020) accurately indicated, particularly because predatory publishers have continued to evolve their undesirable art form into sophisticated operations that appear to be, at face value, legitimate to the point where certain journals and publishers may blatantly exploit gray strategies given that downmarket niches can be lucrative (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. [ This is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, America's leading higher . Citation analysis used for citation manipulation is a form of misconduct and does not fit best editorial practices (a feature of predatory journals mentioned in Grudniewicz et al. Nine months after a dogged academic librarian quietly closed his carefully tended list shaming more than a thousand scientific journals as unscrupulous, the Beall's List Murder Mystery remains unsolved. By 2019, 106,152 articles had been published in its 218 journals, an increase of 64.1% over 2018. ghttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-process-and-industrial-engineering. This is an especially important aspect when the external appearance of the predatory journals, such as the OMICS journals, has reached such a level of sophistication that they totally or partially comply with the formal criteria that serve to differentiate between predatory and legitimate journals. The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs. The third and final step is to focus attention on the background and modus operandi of a journal. before print) varies but is usually accomplished within 2 weeks (Broome 2017). The average increase in the number of published articles was 148.93%. 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. 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. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Title (s): Clinics in oncology. This is calculated by dividing the number of papers that the journal has published (924), by the number of editors (288). Check if the journal is a member of DOAJ, COPE, OASPA or STM 3. This step is greatly facilitated when a journal operates with open peer review. because it is used as a proxy for both quality and integrity. Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research across the entire field of cancer research. The first attempt at identifying predatory journals was Bealls list, although it eventually disappeared in January 2017. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals in (2018) and ranking/leading journal in the category. We will only update links and add notes to this list. 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. More specifically, the case of the mega-publisher OMICS International is well known, which publishes 700 different journals and has been ordered to pay 50.1 million USD in damages in the USA for deceiving thousands of authors who published in its journals and attended its conferences (Brainard 2019). 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, . Lending attention to these signs forms part of step 1 proposed by Kratochvl et al. Conflict of interest statement. 2020) for inclusion in an objective definition. The list of criteria was created after considering which information could be objectively collected and compared across journals and which may fit the suggestion by the above sources that predatory journals do not follow best publication practices. This investigation has approached the study of MDPI-journals that are ranked in the 2019 edition of JCR. Frontiers Media is a publisher of open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. A platinum/diamond open-access model might be close to an ideal academic publishing modelaccording to the terminology of Siler (2020)since it prioritizes professional rather than market logics and then eliminates the drive to publish as many articles as possible to maximize revenue. 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. For example, the APC can be higher than 1,000 USD (as happens for OMICS), there is no specific limit to the number of editorial board members from developing countries that is considered a proper way of distinguishing between legitimate and predatory journals, the content of the web page can appear suspect, and titles may inevitably be mimicked when the journal specialism is very narrow (Kratochvl et al. 2019). Note: When a JCR-indexed journal is ranked in more than one category, 1 its highest rank is depicted in column Q; 2 the leading journal for comparison is the one with the highest impact factor (2018) in the category where the MDPI-journal is ranked. 2020b), PubMed (Manca et al. In any case, the first step towards identifying predatory journals is to have a clear definition for their definitive identification. Once accepted, time to posting the final word document online on a reputable journals Web site i.e. 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. Publishing in predatory journals not only devalues the prestige of the author, but it can contribute to the propagation of errors (Forero et al. . The drop in the impact factor ranged between 38.96% in the case of Sustainability to 0.68% in Medicina with an average reduction of 14.8% in the value of the journal impact factor following the removal of self-citations, with a standard deviation of 9.31 (Figure 5). There can be a lot of differences in the character, quality, and flow of reviews at each . Moreover, the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series, and Publishers downgraded MDPI to 0 in 2019 and later upgraded it to 1 again. Lastly, predatory journals are a threat to scientists who may endanger their careers and devalue their curricula. Individuals have complained about the shallowness of the review process (e.g., 1, 2) and allegedly heavy-handed or unscrupulous tactics by Frontiers to shut down Beall's list of predatory journals (e.g., 3, 4). Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed open access scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. (2019) highlighted the systematic for-profit publication behaviour (COPE 2019) and its prioritization of self-interest at the expense of scholarship (Grudniewicz et al. BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. A further relevant aspect worth focussing upon is the size of the Journal Editorial Board. 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. 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. From December 2019 to January 2020, almost all MDPI-journals (94.33%) scheduled more than one special issue per week during 2020 while, as previously mentioned, the number of regular issues per year was 12 or less for all journals except Energies which had 2 issues in 2018 (Figure 3). Intra-MDPI citation rate 2018 and 2019 (top 10 citing journals). JCR-indexed MDPI-journals (edition 2018, released 2019) were selected for the analysis (53 out of 218). Their new found legitimacy means that any citations will, in consequence, raise the productivity metrics (e.g. To have a clear definition for their definitive identification a journal operates with open peer review endanger careers. By 2019, 106,152 articles had been published in its 218 journals, increase... 2019, 106,152 articles had been published in its 218 journals, increase. 5 ) scientists Who may endanger their careers and devalue their curricula field of cancer.! 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