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. Additionally, some MDPI-journals are indexed in PubMed and in Scopus (MDPI 2020). (2020) highlight, publishers could not explain not following best practices since there are settled by the industry principles for transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing. Take a look at their peer review process and publication timelines 6. I served as a special issue editor and the peer review process they require is above board, rigorous, and transparent. 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. 10 Point checklist to identify predatory publishers. 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. First, a proper systematic and structured overview of APC rates it is not available. Predatory Journals Are Infiltrating Citation Databases, Potential Predatory and Legitimate Biomedical Journals: Can You Tell the Difference? These journals are analysed, not only to contrast the formal criteria for the identification of predatory journals, but taking a step further, their background is also analysed with regard to self-citations and the source of those self-citations in 2018 and 2019. 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. They are likely to be sympathetic, since they will probably default to thinking you were conned into publishing there. Recently, Copiello (2019) focussed attention on the analysis of journal self-citations and publisher self-citations published in the MDPI-journal Sustainability. 2019). analysed 93 checklists in a systematic review of checklists for identifying predatory journals from biomedical fields. Shedding further light on MDPI-journal citing sources, the top 10 MDPI journals for citations listed on the WOS were analysed and intra-MDPI citation levels were identified with other MDPI-journals. Deceptive or scamming journals are also the other name of the . The high rate of self-citations of the journal Sustainability is coherent with data that the journal itself provided in its bibliometric review over the period 200918 (https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/5/1655), showing that Sustainability ranks first in citing journals (2,496 cites) very much over the Journal of Cleaner Production that occupies second position (658 cites) in this bibliographic review. Number of special issues of MDPI-journals (2018, 2019 and 2020). Worryingly, both the numbers of predatory journals and the articles that they publish are continuously increasing (Shen and Bjork 2015). However, as previously shown, some MDPI journals name are very similar to other publishers journals breaching the required condition of not been easily confused with another journal. Furthermore, the low variability of timeframes for peer review regardless of the scope of the journal, the size of its editorial board and the volume of published articles all raise questions over the levels of quality assurance required from a legitimate journal/publisher. As a control group for comparison with JCR-indexed MDPI-journals, the top ranked journal by Impact Factor in each relevant subject category were selected (all under the joint name of non-MDPI-journals in this study) (Table 1). (2020), e.g. There were 53 MDPI-indexed journals in the JCR (2018), 20 of which were ranked Q1, 25 were ranked Q2, and only 8 were ranked Q3 (see Table 1). The strategies of any journal are not made public in such a way that their interests and objectives can be objectively evaluated. Some examples of the MDPI-journals with names similar to other journals are Cells, Cancers, Polymers, Remote Sensing, Animals and Genes, which seem remarkably similar to other journals established earlier and edited by Elsevier (Cell, Polymer, Gene, Remote Sensing of Environment), Wiley (Cancer), and Cambridge University Press (Animal). fhttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-mechanical-engineering. The impact score (IS), also denoted as Journal impact score (JIS), of an academic journal is a measure of the yearly . This investigation has approached the study of MDPI-journals that are ranked in the 2019 edition of JCR. In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. The third and final step is to focus attention on the background and modus operandi of a journal. This multidisciplinary open-access journal is at the forefront of disseminating and . This is calculated by dividing the number of papers that the journal has published (924), by the number of editors (288). All the journals under analysis increased the numbers of their published articles between 2018 and 2019, while 37 of the 53 journals more than doubled the number of published articles within 1 year. 1088 Email Press 2425 Publishers In some cases, where an MDPI-journal was indexed in more than one JCR category, the non-MDPI-journal with the highest impact factor was chosen for comparison. I am just wondering why journals like MDPI and Frontier who deadly fight to cash . 2020). Aurora, United States. In the gold open-access model, reading the publications is free and the publication costs, collected through the Article Processing Charge (APC), are incurred by the authors, their institutions, and funding bodies. Borrowing Martins (2016) terminology, self-citation and citation cartels are stratagems that may be applied to attempt to boost a Journal Impact Factor artificially. A guide has been developed to assist discernment between legitimate and predatory conferences: among which Think.Check.Attend. 2020; Siler 2020). Frederic was setting up a new, online, open access, peer reviewed . Zelenko and Raoult fall in each other's arms. 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. The first attempt at identifying predatory journals was Bealls list, although it eventually disappeared in January 2017. 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. The whole period of time from submission to publication consists of different stages and is directly related with the number of peer-review rounds that are performedit is extraordinarily uncommon to accept a manuscript without at least one peer-review round(depending on two factors: 1 the time the authors will take to introduce the corrections/comments and, in general, the improvement of the original manuscript; and, 2 the length of a new peer-review process). ahttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/environmental-science/journals/fast-publication-in-environmental-science. The journal Nature recently published a definition of the predatory journal (Grudniewicz et al. Frontiers in Oncology. Peer review is a system of safeguards which, despite its limitations, fulfils its function reasonably well of ensuring that false research, of low quality, with serious flaws or inaccurate information is not disseminated, thereby avoiding misinformation (Elmore and Weston 2020; Siler 2020). 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. Figure 2: Analysis of Impact Factor and CiteScore rankings in the JCR Oncology category and CiteScore Oncology category. 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. sharon r pine. Is frontiers a good publisher? 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. It is usually thought that predatory journals charge low APCs (COPE 2019)on average 178$ according to the results of Shen and Bjork (2015), while Shamseer et al. (https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/KanalForlagInfo.action?id=26778andbibsys=false). These actions will send out a clear message to researchers to refuse to publish in and to support predatory journals. Further research would be needed to understand how these faster times are achieved. Bond B. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals (2018)/leading journal in the category. The MDPI, with its headquarters in Basel (Switzerland), formerly known as Molecular Diversity Preservation International (https://www.mdpi.com/about/history) that launched its first two journals (Molecules and Mathematical and Computational Applications) in 1996, operates a gold open- access framework. We agree with Ioannidis and Thombs (2019), in so far as it is highly improbable that any inappropriate use of the Journal Impact Factor will end unless its manipulations are explicitly discredited and, when they are egregious, meaningfully penalized (p. 2). It is beyond the scope of this research to answer that question based on the analysis conducted, further research is needed to address this key question. 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). The COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME Principles for Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing stipulate that journal names should not be easily confused with another journal and that journal websites should not guarantee very short peer-review times (as a member of COPE and DOAJ, MDPI could hardly argue that it ignores those Principles). This is the Citationsy guide to Frontiers in Oncology citations, reference lists, in-text citations, and bibliographies. Level 1 corresponds to journals, which meet at least the following basic scientific criteria: external peer review, academic editorial board and international or national authorship (https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/OmKriterier.action). Title (s): Clinics in oncology. (2020). 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). The following analysis addressed the peer-review process. With respect to the formal criterion of the composition of the Editorial Board, it has not been possible to evaluate whether all the members who form part of these boards are in fact aware of their roles, due to their very high numbers (16,223 individuals), which could be approached in future research. Chorus and Waltman (2016) investigated the effect of self-citations on impact factors during the period 19872015 in all fields of the Sciences and the Social Sciences from WOS data and concluded that self-citation malpractice generates an inflated importance of journals and biased journal rankings (Chorus and Waltman 2016). 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. Even then there's a good chance that . Even though it is also behind a paywall, it may be an additional resource, in order to identify predatory journals. 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. 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. As a consequence of the new context generated by the proliferation of predatory journals, it becomes necessary to review the evaluation policies (Beall 2016). The COPE definition of predatory journals is no different in essence to the definition of Grudniewicz et al. 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. This mega-publisher was initially incorporated on Bealls list and was subsequently excluded on 28th October 2015 as a result of a formal appeal made by MDPI and assessed by four members of Mr Beall's Appeals Board (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/534). All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Both, self-citation and intra-MDPI citation rates directly affects the numerator in the journal impact-factor calculation, raising the journal impact value. The results showed that the self-citation rates increased and was very much higher than those of the leading journals in the JCR category. 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. Just in the same year 2007, the OA publisher Frontiers was . 6 ways to spot a Predatory Journal: 1. It is important that academia and scholars become aware both of the risks of falling into the networks of predatory journals and, in addition, academics should be capable of properly identifying these journals, without presupposing that their inclusion in a prestigious database is a sort of quality hallmark that guarantees the integrity of their authorship, and both their peer-review and their editing processes (Severin and Low 2019; Cortegiani et al. Our chance investigation started after a message from a stranger took me inside a predatory conference and has uncovered how predatory science has ensnared scientists at every level and made a small fortune for the conference organizers. The short time lapse from submission to acceptance (39days) of the manuscripts for all 218 MDPI-journals in 2019 is surprising. (https://thinkcheckattend.org/) is useful, although further studies are needed to analyse that practice in a detailed manner. 2020). https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/principles-transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing. There can be a lot of differences in the character, quality, and flow of reviews at each . Note: When a journal is ranked in more than one category in JCR, 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 categories where the MDPI-journal is ranked. 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). 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. 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. Crucial to any future work is to include a wider range of journals for comparison in order to assess whether any differences observed are significant when compared with journals ranked at similar levels within the JCR. Predatory journals, harmful to academia and science, . Specifically, with regard to the previously mentioned third step, the analysis of the background of the 53 MDPI-journals in JCR showed drops in their impact factors when excluding self-citations, which could be significant if the level of self-citations exceeded those of the leading journals in those categories in which they are indexed. It is known that the peer-review process is invariably shorter in predatory journals than in standard journals and is usually performed within a few days or weeks (Forero et al. According to Mr Beall (2017), a massive email campaign from MDPI directed at different managerial staff at Colorado University had the aim of excluding the editorial from the list. Predatory journals usually offer rapid peer-review processes, but without experts reviewing the quality of research and accuracy of the information (Oerman et al. This step is greatly facilitated when a journal operates with open peer review. As an approximation and with the limitations that it might imply in general terms, that time can be evaluated by comparing it with the review metrics from Nature Research 2019 (https://www.nature.com/nature-research/about/journal-metrics), which show that the average number of days from submission to acceptance fluctuated between 81days (Nature Structural and Molecular Biology) and 258days (Nature Neuroscience). The results serve to point out how self-citation rates and intra-MPDI citation rates both followed a rise between 2018 and 2019. Likewise, Cabells blacklist and whitelist, now referred to as predatory journals and analytics https://blog.cabells.com/2020/06/08/announcement/, listed more than 12,000 predatory journals in October 2019 (https://blog.cabells.com/2019/10/02/the-journal-blacklist-surpasses-the-12000-journals-listed-mark/). 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. (, Shu F., Mongeon P., Haustein S., Siler K., Alperin J. P., Larivire V. (, Xia J., Harmon J. L., Connolly K. G., Donnelly R. M., Anderson M. R., Howard H. A. That's interesting- those are some of the ones I associate with having bad reputations. Economics and Business Management Faculty, Business Management and Marketing Department, University of Seville, Avda. 2019). Data were collected between 2 December 2019 and 4 January 2020. Related Infographic. 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. About Journal : Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research advancing our knowledge of cancer epidemiology, molecular pathways, diagnosis and imaging, personalized therapeutics, and novel treatment and management strategies.. Field Chief Editor Giuseppe Giaccone at Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international . In October 2014 I was approached by a colleague of mine, Frederic Kaplan, from EPFL, for a favour. Though editorial board size is not mentioned in any of the definitions considered (COPE, 2019 and Grudniewicz et al. It is deserving of further analysis that will help us to determine whether it is using a broad range of questionable tactics that are neither illegal nor easy to detect (Manca, Cugusi and Deriu 2019). (Print ISSN: 2768-6701 | Electrronic ISSN: 2768-6698) In any case, the first step towards identifying predatory journals is to have a clear definition for their definitive identification. Predatory journals, harmful to academia and science, sow confusion, promote shoddy scholarship and waste resources (Grudniewicz et al. (2019) state that predatory journals prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and that their behaviour includes deviation from best editorial and publication practices. 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. However, if otherwise, it is necessary to turn to other sources, such as the JCR and the Scopus index and to ascertain whether they have been excluded at any time from those databases (Kratochvl et al. The scientific community must remain alert and must carefully examine the publications in which they wish to make known the results of their investigations, the seed banks for generating the knowledge base to approach specific research questions. All journals published by a predatory publisher are potentially predatory unless stated otherwise. Cukier et al. 2018; Bond et al. I am just asking about the criteria by which Beall's List - of Potential Predatory Journals has been putforward. bhttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/computer-science/journals/fast-publication. Finally, self-citation and intra-MDPI citation rates artificially increase the impact factors of JCR-indexed MDPI-journals that is quite clearly in breach of best practice and integrity in science. Besides, data were collected from JCR (2018) on the Journal Impact Factor and the Impact Factor Without Self Cites. Based on a series of . mimicking names. Focussing our attention on the 53 MDPI-journals under analysis, 84.9% of their websites reported that they provided a first decision within <19days. In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. Lastly, predatory journals are a threat to scientists who may endanger their careers and devalue their curricula. Field Chief Editor Heike Wulff at UC Davis is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. 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. Always check the website thoroughly 2. are all necessary, although not sufficient conditions for proper identification of a predatory journal.
