I can't help but wonder whether the real implication of #ratgate is the realisation of how much the model of #OpenScience people have been working toward is threatened by the advent of #LLMs -
full #OpenAccess suddenly means not just access for people, but also training machines, and the more those can generate content (including online post-peer review comments!) and flood the ecosystem, the more gate keeping will be required
For #Elsevier / #RELX and other massive industrial publishers, increase in paper volume in #APC-driven open access is the main source of growth that is presented to investors. More papers needed to stay afloat in always-increasing proprietary bibliometric sea, bigger profits. On the other end of the business, surveillance backed analytics tools to insurance companies and law enforcement is the biggest growth driver.
These are the companies we have paid billions in public money to over a generation. Another 13% hike in profits, now £3 billion annually. When will we find the courage to say enough is enough?
If anyone wants to talk about "predatory publishers," youre looking at em. #Frontiers is nothing, they just play the game set up by the larger publishers. The call is coming from inside the house - #RELX is the one pushing higher article volumes every year. RELX is the one building the research intelligence platforms that set the value of research and researchers. Blaming #MDPI and #Hindawi and others not only misses the dynamics of the market, it plays directly into the big publisher's ad copy where they claim only they can protect Truth.
When I realized that my (beloved, at the time) #ResearchGate decided to associate with the publisher #MDPI (known for shady practices, neglecting the peer-review process, used to be on Beall's list of predatory publishers, etc.), I created a little document to demand that they stop the partnership.
They totally did not care, but my little "cover page" has been the most read document from Neuroscience and from my institution in the past few weeks and it got recommended 780 times, I don't think I'll ever beat that with a real paper! 😂
It also started an interesting discussion, although I'm still not sure what the arguments in favour of MDPI are except 'other publishers are bad tooooo'. 🤔
If you're curious, it's here until I close my account, i.e. tomorrow, on the last day of 2023!!
I kind of like #MDPI for demonstrating how easy it is to make a ton of money by exploiting the flawed system of tying scientific publishing to scientists' performance evaluations.
The #boycott, which also applies to Nutrients’ publisher, #MDPI, comes after repeated requests to the journal’s editors asking them to institute sound editorial practices.
So #ResearchGate just made an agreement with... the predatory publisher #MDPI
I know not everyone liked it but I was actually finding ResearchGate quite useful. Now this is completely trashing the little reputation they had left in the toilet. MDPI might have a few good journals but it is overall famously known for its predatory practices like not listening to the reviewers and not having enough time for proper review between submission and publication.
This is a really disappointing move from ResearchGate that's really not in their interest. I guess they got a big check for it? Makes you wonder what other unscientific content are they getting paid to promote.
I'm going to write to them (e.g. press@researchgate.net) to ask that they cut all ties with MDPI and any other predatory publishers. I hope that many users will complain too. If it has no effect, I'll just have to close my account and never go there again...
"MDPI’s commitment to delivering a high-quality service for our authors" :rofl:
I guess you could say that not having proper peer-review is a service to the authors in a way?? 🤔
Apparently #MDPI doesn't hesitate to pressurize your employer if you criticize them:
"Beall's list was shut down in 2017. Beall later wrote that he had been pressured to shut down the list by his employer University of Colorado Denver and various publishers, specifically mentioning MDPI as a publisher that had "tried to be as annoying as possible to the university so that the officials would get so tired of the emails that they would silence me just to make them stop.""
@elduvelle Has anyone received any kind of reply from #researchgate, or indeed any statement at all from them? I got no response, so am moving to delete my account asap #mdpi
PS: As far as I can tell, the authors didn't distinguish #APCs paid by authors out of pocket from APCs paid by their employers or funders. The $17m is the total from all sources. I'd love to see a breakdown. https://suber.pubpub.org/pub/j1jk6hu9
The publishing sector has a problem. Scientists are overwhelmed, editors are overworked, special issue invitations are constant, research paper mills, article retractions, journal delistings… JUST WHAT IS GOING ON!?
We see that certain groups are major drivers of this article growth, in some cases seemingly out of nothingness. This includes your classic publishers like #Elsevier and #Springer, but also the upstarts #Frontiers and… most significantly #MDPI.
In numbers, there were nearly 1 million more articles per year published in 2022 (2.8m) compared to 2016 (1.9m). MDPI takes the lion’s share at 27% of that growth, with Elsevier (16%) a distant 2nd.
Now, it’s not our place to judge what an average TAT is supposed to be, but we’re very confident it’s not 37 days across all research fields. Experiment requests in fruit flies take weeks, whereas mice will take months.
TATs are also supposed to vary from article to article: some articles are great on 1st draft, some need a little TLC, and some need… a lot… Yet #MDPI journals in particular, across the board, accept everything in a blistering 37 days with almost no variation. 6/n
But it’s not just #MDPI: #Frontiers and #Hindawi also grew their share of special issues. One might argue: “These are just labels publishers use. The peer review process is the same.”
Au contraire mon ami : no it’s not. Special issues have lower TATs. They’re intended to be lax. They’re for authors to voice ideas that could turn out to be wrong, but advance the conversation in the field. That’s what they used to be at least… and what made them “special.” But I digress… 7/n
We also looked at rejection rates (RRs), with some caveats: we took a publisher’s word at what their RRs were, and don’t know underlying methods. But we figured RRs will at least be calc’d consistently within groups. We compared relative RRs over time and RRs compared to proportions of special issues.
Again, #MDPI was the maverick, with a unique decline in RRs over time. Not only that, but in both #Hindawi & MDPI, more special issues means lower RRs. The review process is not the same. 8/n
We developed a new metric that we call “Impact Inflation.” Impact Inflation is the ratio of Impact Factor to Scimago Journal Rank (IF/SJR). Because IF values total cites (no matter the source), but SJR fails to reward authors aggressively self/co-citing, IF can become extremely inflated compared to SJR for journals hosting citation cartels.
Key point: Impact Inflation is a metric that shows to what extent a journal has succumbed to Goodhart’s law. And well… once again #MDPI leads the pack. 12/n
Talking within-journal self-cites, once again #MDPI has the highest rates
What’s more we also see groups like #Hindawi have higher Impact Inflation, but normal self-cite levels. What gives?
Well, SJR also weights a citation based on where it comes from, and because MDPI journals aren’t well-cited (except by themselves), their citations aren’t worth much. And because MDPI growth came out of nowhere, they’re now exporting huge numbers of citations to others, including a penchant for Hindawi 13/n
So where does that leave us? Well, it’s easy to talk about #MDPI because… scroll up. But fundamentally we need to address strain. We’re all overworked, and we can’t let this go on.
Our metrics tell us this growth isn’t rigorous science. Special issues are lowering standards, which nets groups like MDPI more articles, and more money 💱. We don’t have revenue data, but for-profit gold OA ties revenues to articles published. So it’s no surprise that some groups are gonna spam engines of growth 14/n