Headquartered in Basel,
Switzerland, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, or more usually
MDPI, is an open access
publisher that has had a challenging few years. It has been charged with excessively
spamming researchers in order to maximise APC revenue, it has
been accused of publishing pseudoscience, and it has been criticised for publishing
papers of very poor quality. This has occasionally led to editorial board resignations
e.g. here and here.
The criticism came to a head in
February last year, when University of Colorado (Denver) librarian Jeffrey Beall added MDPI
to his controversial list of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access
publishers”.
Today I am publishing a Q&A
with MDPI. First however, in the way of background, I want to rehearse some key
events (in date order). Please scroll down if you want to go direct to the interview.
= Update: Jeffrey Beall removed MDPI from his list on 27th October 2015 =
= Update: Jeffrey Beall removed MDPI from his list on 27th October 2015 =
 |
From
left to right: Alistair Freeland, Delia Costache, Dietrich Rordorf, Maria Schalnich, Martyn Rittman, Shu-Kun
Lin, Franck Vazquez
|
A target for criticism, but favoured by some
MDPI AG was
spun out of Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) in 2010 by the owner of both organisations Shu-Kun
Lin, along with the then CEO of MDPI Dietrich Rordorf. In the process
a number of journals were relocated to MDPI, and since then MDPI’s portfolio of
open access journals has grown to 137.
Last year MDPI published over 12,000 papers.
MDPI’s difficulties appear to have started in December 2010, when one
of its journals — Life — published a paper by Erik Andrulis called Theory
of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Aiming to present a framework
to explain life, the paper was greeted with scepticism and ridicule. The popular
science and technology magazines Ars Technica and Popular Science, for instance, characterised
the ideas in the paper as “crazy” and “hilarious”.
The publication of the paper led to a member of Life’s editorial board resigning,
and Shu-Kin Lin published a response to the criticism. In his response, Shu-Kin Lin
conceded that he had taken over responsibility for the review process when the
researcher assigned to the task (a Professor Bassez) has pulled out for
personal reasons. But he insisted that the paper had been properly peer
reviewed, and that it had been revised in response to the reports of two
reviewers. His explanation, however, attracted further criticism.
In April 2011 a second controversy erupted when the
MDPI journal Nutrients published a paper called The Australian Paradox: A Substantial
Decline in Sugars Intake over the Same Timeframe that Overweight and Obesity
Have Increased. This too attracted criticism, and an Australian economist
created a website in order to
launch a campaign to have the paper retracted. (There is also a Wikipedia page
on the paper here).
The Australian Paradox paper has not been retracted,
but it has twice been corrected by the authors (in 2011 and 2014), and in 2012 the
Editor-in-Chief published an editorial
about the paper, along with a response
to the criticism from the authors. In addition, in July 2014 the University of
Sydney (the institution where one of the authors is based) published an independent report
concluding that of the seven criticisms that had been levelled at the authors
the “only allegation substantiated concerned two ‘simple arithmetic’ errors,
specifically an inconsistency and an incorrect calculation”.
Notwithstanding these controversies, MDPI has attracted many supporters,
not least amongst OA advocates and cognoscenti of open access. When, on 31st
October 2012, MDPI launched a new open access journal called Publications, for instance, it was able to recruit well-regarded
scholars who specialise in research on open access to its editorial board. Currently,
membership of the board includes Mikael
Laakso and Bo-Christer
Björk (Björk has also published
in the journal), and at one time de facto
leader of the open access movement Peter Suber also served on
the board.
OA advocates have also proved more than willing to
publish in the journal. Contributors include Heather Morrison (here and here), Martin
Eve (here), John Wilbanks (here), and David Solomon (here). And in 2013 Björn Brembs agreed to edit a special
issue for the journal.
Also of note, the Editor-in-Chief of Publications is John
Regazzi, a former CEO of Ei Inc. (where he founded the first professional engineering
online community — the Engineering
Information Village). Regazzi is also a former CEO of Elsevier Inc.
(I interviewed
him for Information Today in 1998).
Likewise, a number of open access advocates serve
on the editorial board of MDPI’s journal Data,
including Peter Murray-Rust
and Ross Mounce (although the
journal does not appear to have
published any papers).
Finally, we could note that at one point Suber was also on the editorial
board of Future Internet, an MDPI journal
that in January 2010 published an article
by Jeffrey Beall called Metadata for Name
Disambiguation and Collocation (a contribution that Beall later said he regretted).
