Avalanche of papers could erode trust in science - News
peter.suber's bookmarks 2024-12-24
Summary:
"The new study provides detailed analysis of the situation, using data on publisher growth, processing times of articles and “citation behaviours” (articles referencing each other).
It finds certain publishers, such as MDPI and Elsevier, have “disproportionately hosted” the growth – and sets out ways to address the issue....
Around half of the new papers came from the five large traditional publishers Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer, Nature and Wiley, who increased their yearly output of papers by roughly 61% between 2013 and 2022.
This was achieved by upping both the number of journals in their portfolio and the number of papers per journal. The remainder of the growth came from newer, for-profit open-access publishers such as Frontiers, Hindawi and Multidisciplinary Publishing Institute (MDPI)....
The study found that MDPI had an average turnaround time of about 37 days, a fraction of other publishing groups. This low turnaround time was highly consistent across its journals. “From submission to acceptance, you can’t properly peer-review most complex scientific papers in 37 days,” Dr Hanson said...."