MDPI Journals: 2015 -2021 | Dan Brockington

peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-11-10

Summary:

"In this blog I report on growth of MDPI journals and papers from 2015-2021. It updates previous blogs on the same topic (the most recent is here) that looked at growth up to 2020....

By every measure MDPI’s growth continues to be remarkable. The rate of revenue increase has slowed in the last two years, to just over 50%, but even that remains extraordinary.  Note that the proportion of submissions that are published has increased, from around 44% two years ago to over 55% currently (Table 1; Figure 1)....

The growth in publications is partly sustained by lower rejection rates. The journals with the lowest rejection rates used to count for only a minority of publications and fees (Tables 2-4). Now figures for 2021 show that journals with low rejection rates are producing a higher proportion of MDPI publications....

MDPI itself has been aware of the dangers of being too inclusive. In its 2015 annual report it noted that the overall rejection rate had increased since last year (from 52 to 54%). This achievement was listed in one of the key performance indicators as a sign of progress....

Because acceptance and rejection data are no longer available on the MDPI website, we will not know what is happening to rejection rates. We cannot know, at the level of each journal, how inclusive they are, or are becoming. This points to a wider need for all publishing houses to be more transparent with the data of their journals to allow researchers to make informed choices about their journals. MDPI’s transparency had been welcome. It is now, unfortunately, following the standards set by the other publishing houses...."

Link:

https://danbrockington.com/2022/11/10/mdpi-journals-2015-2021/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.mdpi oa.publishers oa.gold oa.journals oa.growth oa.transparency

Date tagged:

11/10/2022, 16:19

Date published:

11/10/2022, 11:19