Is MDPI a predatory publisher?
Edit April 20th, 2021: thanks to Christos Petrou I found a bug in my code. I was considering both “Section” and “Collection” articles as Speical Issue. The whole analysis has been changed to accommodate the new data. I also acknowledged in the text the arguments of Volker Beckmann, who develops a coherent defense of MDPI practices and disagrees with my overall take; and inserted references to what MDPI (and traditional publishers) are doing for the Global South inline at the end of the piece, thanks to input from Mister Sew, Ethiopia.
The post aims to answer the question in the title: “Is MDPI a predatory publisher?” with some data I scraped from the MDPI website, and some personal opinions.
So, is MDPI predatory or not? I think it has elements of both. I would name their methods aggressive rent extracting, rather than predatory. And I also think that their current methods & growth rate are likely to make them shift towards more predatory over time.
MDPI publishes good papers in good journals, but it also employs some strategies that are proper to predatory publishers. I think that the success of MDPI in recent years is due to the creative combination of these two apparently contradicting strategy. One — the good journals with high quality — creates a rent that the other — spamming hundreds of colleagues to solicit papers, an astonishing increase in Special Issues, publishing papers as fast as possible — exploits.This strategy makes a lot of sense for MDPI, who shows strong growth rates and is en route to become the largest open access publisher in the world. But I don’t think it is a sustainable strategy. It suffers from basic collective action problems, that might deal a lot of damage to MDPI first, and, most importantly, to scientific publishing in general.
