Frontiers is merely a symptom of an utterly rotten scholarly publishing system, which is beyond repair. (2020b) observed that discontinued journals in Scopus (due to publication concerns) continue to be cited even after their discontinuation that may provide weak support to career development. ehttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-control-and-signal-processing. Unfortunately, there is no information available on the time from submission to the final decision for the 53 journals under analysis, only minimum and maximum times from submission to first decision, as shown in Figure 4. COPE and OASPA have retained Frontiers as a member after concerns were raised. This analysis of the practices of MDPI is of relevance to researchers and for research institutions and funding bodies as well as for JCR itself, which could see its prestige compromised, if it incorporated predatory journals among its indexed journals. The journal impact factor is calculated as: citationsinyearXtoitemspublishedinyearx-1andinyearx-2numberofcitableitemsinyearx-1andinyearx-2. 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. 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). The same information was collected from journal web pages, WOS (Core Collection) and JCR for leading journals in each JCR category where the MDPI-journals were indexed. It would be of interest to enlarge the time span for the analysis of these journals and to observe their behavioural patterns with regard to their citation practices. ahttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/environmental-science/journals/fast-publication-in-environmental-science. Grudniewicz et al. dhttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/materials-science/journals/fast-publication. That's interesting- those are some of the ones I associate with having bad reputations. Bond B. Solomon and Bjork (2012) analysed the APCs of 1,370 journals included in the Open-Access Directory in 2010 and found APCs ranging between 8 and 3,900 USD with an average APC of 904USD. Predatory journals usually offer rapid peer-review processes, but without experts reviewing the quality of research and accuracy of the information (Oerman et al. Therefore, these Principles, supported by different institutions, are useful for detecting deviation from best practices in publishing. Similar pernicious effects can be expected from citation stacking when journals cite each other to raise their impact factors (Heneberg 2016). 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. Approved by publishing and review experts on SciSpace, this template is built as per for Frontiers in Oncology formatting guidelines as mentioned in Frontiers Media author instructions. The Editor Ethics 2.0 Code (https://editorethics.uncc.edu/editor-ethics-2-0-code/) sets out an explicit ban on this malpractice in the fields of Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Management. 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. Better Service 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. 2018). 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. He demonstrated that the self-citations of Sustainability, in 2016 and 2017, in relation to articles published in 2015, in no way corresponded to a uniform probability distribution. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals (2018)/leading journal in the category. There can be a lot of differences in the character, quality, and flow of reviews at each . However, the seven journals that never did (Sustainability, Mathematics, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Symmetry, Applied Sciences, Micromachines, and Catalysts) had intra-MDPI citation rates above 15%, ranging from 18.73% in Catalysts to 46.55% in Sustainability (Table 3). Number of special issues of MDPI-journals (2018, 2019 and 2020). Eigengrad 3 yr. ago. First, a proper systematic and structured overview of APC rates it is not available. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals betray both traits through a steady increase in number of their published articles (sometimes to several hundred in just one regular issue) and special issues. All journals, except the International Journal of Molecular Science, increased self-citation rates between 2018 and 2019 (between 2.7 and 16.9 points). 2019). A predatory journal will exploit this model to its own benefit with an inexistent or practically inexistent peer-review process (Beall 2015; Frandsen 2017; Demir 2018), which permits the rapid publication of academic papers without due guarantees, with an associated risk to the quality of the published science. 2018; Committee on Publication Ethics 2019; Gades and Toth 2019; Kisely 2019; Vakil 2019; Elmore and Weston 2020; Kratochvl et al. 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. The problem is that each of these criteria, above all if taken in an isolated way, are questionable and may occur singly or together in non-predatory journals. These results showed that the MDPI journals under analysis fitted some features of the definition of predatory journals (Grudniewicz et al. 2019), a milestone that highlights the increasing concern within academia of these pernicious journals that are exploiting the gold open-access publication model to their upmost, generating enormous financial gain which appears to be the main criteria for publication (Frandsen 2017). In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. Poor Peer Review Practices. More specifically, in general terms, the average time from submission to first decision from MDPI-journals was 19days, both in 2019 and 2018 (MDPI 2020), despite the increase in the number of both journals (15 new journals from 2018) and articles which were published (a 64.1% increase compared to 2018). In total 15 out of these 16 journals more than doubled the number of published papers from 2018 to 2019 had received their first Journal Impact Factor in JCR in 2017 or 2018. In turn, the publishing house Elsevier reported the average review and production times of its journals in such varied areas as Environmental Science, Computer Science, and Mathematics and Statistics (see Table 4). Check the journal's contact information 4. 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. Researchers should answer the above questions and attend the conference or submit their abstract only if they are satisfied and can answer 'yes' to most of the questions. 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. Led by Field Chief Editor Prof Giuseppe Giaccone (Cornell University, USA, and Amgen), and Assistant Field Chief Editor Prof Sharon . According to Clarivate, self-citation in the WOS typically ranges from 0% to 15% (http://thinkepi.net/notas/crecs_2017/J_9_45_Cahue.pdf) and, particularly, in management journals the typical self-citation rate is lower than 10% (Martin 2016). Frontiers Media is a publisher of open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a reference for the assessment of researchers and for grant-making decisions, is used as a standard whitelist, in so far as the selectivity of a JCR-indexed journal adds a legitimacy of sorts to the articles that the journal publishes. Besides, an increasingly high rate of citations from other MDPI-journals was observed. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals in (2018) and ranking/leading journal in the category. 2020b), PubMed (Manca et al. The COPE definition of predatory journals is no different in essence to the definition of Grudniewicz et al. The strategies of any journal are not made public in such a way that their interests and objectives can be objectively evaluated. ghttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-process-and-industrial-engineering. 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. 2020). Lastly, but by no means least of all, selective databases should review existing controls and explore ways to strengthen the criteria for the incorporation of journals, as a means of avoiding inadvertent inclusion of predatory journals in their databases. Having completed the verification of the formal criteria, Kratochvl et al. The analysis of journal self-citations is relevant (see Table 2), because the increase in the numerator of the Journal Impact Factor4 boosts it and may be a stratagem to improve the position of a journal in the ranking through coercive citations, online queuing and self-cited editorials (Martin 2016; Wilhite et al. 2020) [italics added]. As depicted in Figure 5, the impact factors of all journals were reduced when self-citations were removed. Focussing our attention on the 53 MDPI-journals under analysis, 84.9% of their websites reported that they provided a first decision within <19days. Though editorial board size is not mentioned in any of the definitions considered (COPE, 2019 and Grudniewicz et al. 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 results showed the average time from submission to first decision of JCR-indexed MDPI-journals was 19days, according to data provided in journals pages, section named Journal Statistics. The APCs published on the journal web pages of the 53 journals under analysis imply that the articles published in 2019 could have generated an approximate income of 153,834,500 CHF (no APC-related waiver or discount could be considered in this calculation as no JCR-indexed journal provides relevant detailed information on the topic). In 2019, almost all 53 MDPI-journals under analysis had intra-MDPI citation rates well above 20% (all except Universe11.87% and Catalysts18.73%), reaching values as high as 56.94% in Electronics, 51.07% in the IJGI, 47.56% in Remote Sensing, and 46.55% in Sustainability (Table 3). 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. Further research would be needed to understand how these faster times are achieved. 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. Once accepted, time to posting the final word document online on a reputable journals Web site i.e. 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. Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed open access scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. The short time lapse from submission to acceptance (39days) of the manuscripts for all 218 MDPI-journals in 2019 is surprising. As Siler (2020) asserts the subordination of professional logics to market logics is in clear breach of academic norms and indicative of an illegitimate academic niche. As Manca et al. From a prescriptive viewpoint, Teixeira da Silva and Dobrnszki (2017) understood that the initial review could not reasonably last longer than 12months, to which another 12months have to be added for subsequent revision of the paper, amounting to as many as 8months, in the case of a process with three revisions. 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, . 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 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 Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is owned by the German publishing house Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which is also the partial owner of Frontiers. 2020) for inclusion in an objective definition. 2018; Bond et al. These actions will send out a clear message to researchers to refuse to publish in and to support predatory journals. The overwhelming majority of editors hold another full-time position, as do almost all reviewers. 2019), the term predatory journal is undoubtedly the most extensive in academia and appropriately describes this malpractice (Manca et al. This multidisciplinary open-access journal is at the forefront of disseminating and . As shown in Figure 4, the minimum for most journals (77.35%) was <15 days from submission to the first decision and the maximum was under 22 days. As the above results show, the review periods for all JCR-indexed MDPI-journals are similar and are commonly shorter than considered normal, despite the variation in number of published articles and themes. Title (s): Clinics in oncology. Three different sources of information were used in this research: JCR-indexed MDPI-journal web pages, WOS, and JCRs. Only in that way will the editors decisions be based on editorial reasoning rather than any covert intention to inflate citations artificially. h-index) of their authors, generating inflated curricula and doped academic careers (Cortegiani, Manca and Giarratano, 2020a). 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). M ngeles Oviedo-Garca, Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), Research Evaluation, Volume 30, Issue 3, July 2021, Pages 405419a, https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvab020. However, this fact only partially could explain the notable increase in output content for just 43.39% of 53-MDPI journals received their first impact factor in 2017 or in 2018 while the increase in output content is observed for the all 53-MDPI journals. ihttps://www.elsevier.com/life-sciences/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/journals/fast-publication-in-agricultural-science. 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. 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 journals origin or association with other journals. The number of special issues was over twice the number of ordinary issues in 92.45% of the MDPI-journals under analysis. None declared. In fact, high impact factors may merely be due to citation cartels instead of true and legitimate scientific interest (Ioannidis and Thombs 2019). However, significant differences have been found between large publishers (publishing more than 100 journals) that charge an average fee of 796$ and the publishers of a single journal that charge an average fee of 83$ (Shen and Bjork, 2015). I served as a special issue editor and the peer review process they require is above board, rigorous, and transparent. 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). He is the person who analyzed and observed a growing number of the exploitative academic journals charging author fees without the proper quality and the published papers. These formal criteria, such as unambiguous determination of APC and Publisher, accurate information on the journal metrics, the inclusion of the name of the editor-in-chief, etc. 2020). Aurora, United States. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Wikipedia lists various controversies about Frontiers articles and resignations of editors. 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. (2020), the effect of self-citation and citation cartels may be halted by the use of JIF-without self-cites metric, a simple action that reduces the penalty faced by journals that decide not to manipulate so, in sum, ethical editors are not penalized and manipulative editors are not advantaged (Wilhite et al. For example, they no longer have webs with typographic errors, but with a much more sophisticated appearance, converting themselves into a non-evident/hidden predatory publisher, in view of their editorial behaviour. Globally, the total number of articles published in 2019 by the 53 MDPI-journals under analysis was 93,240, representing a global increase of 74.95% in 2018. The lack of content analysis is a limitation of this study and could be performed in future research with a random sample of articles published in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals in line with Step 2 proposed by Kratochvl et al. Data on each selected journal were gathered from the following sections of the MDPI-journal web pages: Home, Editorial Board, Special Issues, APC, and Journal Statistics. 2018) with all the consequences that may entail, not only at a scientific but at a social level. 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. 2020). Division of Medical Oncology, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Figure 2: Analysis of Impact Factor and CiteScore rankings in the JCR Oncology category and CiteScore Oncology category. 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