BishopBlog: Finland vs. Germany: the case of MDPI

"It's been an odd week for the academic publisher MDPI. On 16th December, Finland's Publication Forum (known as JUFO) announced that from January 2025 it was downgrading its classification of 271 open access journals to the lowest level, zero. By my calculations, this includes 187 journals from MDPI and 82 from Frontiers, plus 2 others. This is likely to deter Finnish researchers from submitting work to these journals, as the rating indicates they are of low quality. As explained in an article in the Times Higher Education, JUFO justified its decision on the grounds that these journals “aim to increase the number of publications with the minimum time spend for editorial work and quality assessment”. 

Then the very next day, 17th December, MDPI announced that it had secured a national publishing agreement with ZB Med, which offered substantial discounts to authors from over 100 German Universities publishing in MDPI journals. On Bluesky, this news was not greeted with the universal joy that ZB Med might have anticipated, with comments such as "an embarrassment", "shocking", and "a catastrophe".

To understand the background, it's worth reading a thread on Bluesky by Mark Hanson, one of the authors of a landmark paper entitled "The Strain on Scientific Publishing". This article showed that MDPI and Frontiers stand out from other publishers in terms of having an exponential growth in number of papers published in recent years, a massive shift to special issues as a vehicle for this increase, and a sharp drop in publication lag from 2016 to 2022...."