The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, MDPI, is an Open-Access scientific publisher that has grown exponentially in recent years. Much of this growth comes in the form of Special Issues (summarized in an excellent blog post by Paolo Crosetto) - to the point where these vastly outnumber the regular issues in nearly all of their journals. Special Issues efficiently leverage the Guest Editors’ professional networks and are ruthlessly clever. After all, we feel much more guilty not accepting an invitation to submit a manuscript from a Guest Editor we know than one we don’t. For many of their journals, the topics of these special issues have large overlaps. Indeed, they are so close that at any given time, there are multiple open Special Issues to which a manuscript could be submitted, regardless of topic. For example, researchers in the field of public transportation working on a sustainability project currently have at least eleven open Special Issues to which a manuscript on this topic could be submitted:
Road Traffic Engineering and Sustainable Transportation - The Second Edition
Innovative Interactions for Smart Public Transport
Future Prospects in Sustainable Engineering Development for Transport Infrastructures and Systems
Sustainable Public Transport in Urban Areas – Optimization, Management and Development
Recent Advances and New Perspectives on Sustainable Transportation Engineering
Sustainable Public Transport and Logistics Network Optimization
Sustainable Development of Urban Mobility through Active Travel and Public Transport
Sustainable Road Transport System Planning and Optimization
Multi-criteria Decision Making and Sustainable Transport
Development Trends of Sustainable Mobility
Towards Future Public Transport Systems: Techniques for Improving Quality of Services
There are probably many more open Special Issues where such a manuscript would be considered. These are only examples from a single section (Sustainable Transportation) in a single journal (Sustainability), a journal which publishes nearly ten Special Issues per day! For being Special Issues, it seems they are not all that special. The main difference between these Special Issues appears to be that they tap into the different professional networks of their respective Guest Editors. Many other journals of course also do this for their Special Issues. Perhaps once or twice per year. The difference is that MDPI takes this well-established concept to a whole new extreme.
As most actively publishing researchers, I too get very frequent invitations to submit a manuscript to one of these Special Issues. Often I am promised that I will get “100% discounts (free of charge)” for my contribution as an invited author. This is usually emphasized and the end of the invitation, stating that “an article processing charge of 2100 CHF currently applies to each accepted paper”, but “as a feature paper, we will *waive* the APC for you”. To make sure I didn’t miss this opportunity. But why? What have I done to deserve this “honor”? The logic behind inviting senior academics in the field to publish for free is obvious. The journal expects their papers will be of high quality and help boost their Impact Factor, thereby motivating the high “rent” asked from less established researchers. But how fair is this? Senior academics from high-income countries can easily afford the page charges, whereas more junior researchers from low- or middle-income countries cannot. Other journals often give discounts to those who have served as reviewers in the past 12 months. This at least seems more fair, or deserved.
Finally, and on a more positive note perhaps, I will mention one thing MDPI did well, or even brilliantly. This is the decision is to give all their journals one-word names, creating a brand identity and also, in our less critical subconscious, positive associations with prestigious single-word journals such as Nature, Science or Cell.
This blog post reflects the opnions of the author only, and not those of any employer or publisher.