However, this fact only partially could explain the notable increase in output content for just 43.39% of 53-MDPI journals received their first impact factor in 2017 or in 2018 while the increase in output content is observed for the all 53-MDPI journals. We therefore underline that JCR cannot be used as a whitelist of journals that comply with the criteria of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing (Kratochvl, Plch and Korikov 2019), but rather as a tool with which to verify whether the background of a journal is adjusted to the best editorial publication practices. Division of Medical Oncology, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Frontiers is merely a symptom of an utterly rotten scholarly publishing system, which is beyond repair. We aim to facilitate the dissemination of high-quality research in the area of biomedical science. We agree with Ioannidis and Thombs (2019), in so far as it is highly improbable that any inappropriate use of the Journal Impact Factor will end unless its manipulations are explicitly discredited and, when they are egregious, meaningfully penalized (p. 2). As a consequence of the new context generated by the proliferation of predatory journals, it becomes necessary to review the evaluation policies (Beall 2016). Journal impact factors of MDPI-journals with and without self-citations (2018). The use of JCR has been extended, both for the evaluation of academics and institutions of all types, legitimizing the journals that are indexed, which evaluate the publications included in scholarly records when taking decisions on promotion, tenure, grants, etc. Assistant Field Chief Editor. About Journal : Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research advancing our knowledge of cancer epidemiology, molecular pathways, diagnosis and imaging, personalized therapeutics, and novel treatment and management strategies.. Field Chief Editor Giuseppe Giaccone at Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international . It is remarkable that in the aforementioned bibliometric study over the period 200918, the first 30 positions in the citation ranking were occupied by journals from the same publisher (#3 Energies, #8 Water, #23 International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, #24 Remote Sensing and #30 IJGI). The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) released the Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing (last version published 15 January 2018) together with the Directory of Open-Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open-Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). 2018). Title (s): Clinics in oncology. The problem is that each of these criteria, above all if taken in an isolated way, are questionable and may occur singly or together in non-predatory journals. Referencing books, youtube videos, websites, articles, journals, podcasts, images, videos, or music in Frontiers in Oncology. The revision times of the 53 journals under analysis were surprisingly similar, regardless of the high variability of the articles published in each journal in 2019 and were, in many cases, very much shorter than time spans that may be considered normal. Furthermore, no less importantly, the analysis showed that a large number of the citations that they receive are from other MDPI-journals. Peer review is used to evaluate the article for significance of the topic, relevance, rigor, analytic methods, conclusions, depth of discussion, and validity of conclusions based on data/arguments in the article (Broome 2017), although predatory journals rarely invite experts who are experts in the field (Broome 2017). Additionally, the constant and quite exceptional increase in the number of articles published in MDPI-journals between 2018 and 2019, reinforced by an exponential increase in the number of special issues, which easily outweigh the number of regular publications (above all in view of the previsions for 2020), together with an increase in APC fees could bring into question the status of MDPI as a publisher, at the very least because its APC-based business model alters the economic and scientific incentives in academic publishing (Siler 2020). 2019). (https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/KanalForlagInfo.action?id=26778andbibsys=false). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (, Improving universities activities in academic startup support through public interventions: The effectiveness of the German programme EXISTleverage of potentials, Changing conceptualization of innovation in the European Union and its impact on universities: Critical junctures and evolving institutional demands, Gender diversity and publication activityan analysis of STEM in the UK, Assessing the variety of collaborative practices in translational research: An analysis of scientists ego-networks, Early career academic's odyssey: A narrative study of her professional identity construction. ghttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-process-and-industrial-engineering. In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. This step is greatly facilitated when a journal operates with open peer review. However, they've done a pretty good job maintaining reputation, though it certainly differs per-journal. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in London, Madrid, Seattle and Brussels. Record, verify, and showcase your peer review contributions in a format you can include in job and funding applications (without breaking reviewer anonymity). In summary: 1 researchers should neither send papers for their publication, nor cite them, nor act as reviewers for them, nor form part of their editorial committees; 2 research institutions should inform researchers of the reality of predatory journals and their iniquitous consequences at an individual and general level; and, 3 evaluation agencies and committees should ignore the registers that refer to predatory journals. It would be of interest to enlarge the time span for the analysis of these journals and to observe their behavioural patterns with regard to their citation practices. Field Chief Editor Heike Wulff at UC Davis is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. Besides, an increasingly high rate of citations from other MDPI-journals was observed. The physicist Ahmed Hindawi and his wife, the mathematician Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb, started their publishing house in their home country Egypt in 1997; 10 years later they converted Hindawi to open access. 1088 Email Press 2425 Publishers Despite the fact that impact-factor manipulation may result in criminal liability according to Fong et al. (2019) highlighted the systematic for-profit publication behaviour (COPE 2019) and its prioritization of self-interest at the expense of scholarship (Grudniewicz et al. Moreover, the term predatory journal was found by Jeffery Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Better Service Lastly, predatory journals are a threat to scientists who may endanger their careers and devalue their curricula. chttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/mathematics/journals/fast-publication. The complete, comprehensive guide shows you how easy citing any source can be. Further research would be needed to understand how these faster times are achieved. After Frontiers was listed as a potential predatory publisher, Nature News has reported on the scientists' protests about this addition to the "controversial 'Beall's List'". 2020; Siler 2020). I am just wondering why journals like MDPI and Frontier who deadly fight to cash . Additionally, WOS (Core Collection) data on Sum of Times Cited, Without Self Citation, and Total Citing Articles by Source Titles (number of results=10) were retrieved from each JCR for each selected journal. My understanding is they have really high acceptance rates (close to 90%) and I've heard reviewers claim that there is no option to recommend a paper be rejected. These steps are particularly urgent for databases that already include MDPI-journals (WOS, PubMed and Scopus), since the defining features of predatory journals are that they systematize for profit publication (COPE 2019) and prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship (Grudniewicz et al. The impact score (IS), also denoted as Journal impact score (JIS), of an academic journal is a measure of the yearly . Data were collected between 2 December 2019 and 4 January 2020. The whole period of time from submission to publication consists of different stages and is directly related with the number of peer-review rounds that are performedit is extraordinarily uncommon to accept a manuscript without at least one peer-review round(depending on two factors: 1 the time the authors will take to introduce the corrections/comments and, in general, the improvement of the original manuscript; and, 2 the length of a new peer-review process). Conflict of interest statement. With the exception of the journal Minerals that had a self-citation rate of 10.75% in 2018, compared to 12.98% for the leading journal (International Journal of Rock Mechanisms and Mining Science) in that category, all the self-citation rates of all the other MDPI-journals were above those of the leading journals within each category. The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is owned by the German publishing house Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which is also the partial owner of Frontiers. Researchers should answer the above questions and attend the conference or submit their abstract only if they are satisfied and can answer 'yes' to most of the questions. Journals Suppressed from 2018 JCR Data2019 releasein https://help.incites.clarivate.com/incitesLiveJCR/JCRGroup/titleSuppressions.html), which as a consequence, will receive no impact factor for 1 year, due to the distortion of the rank of the journal in each category that no longer accurately reflects the journals true participation, by way of citation, in the scholarly literature of its subject (https://support.clarivate.com/ScientificandAcademicResearch/s/article/Journal-Citation-Reports-Explanation-of-Missing-Dropped-or-Suppressed-Journals?language=en_US). Chorus and Waltman (2016) investigated the effect of self-citations on impact factors during the period 19872015 in all fields of the Sciences and the Social Sciences from WOS data and concluded that self-citation malpractice generates an inflated importance of journals and biased journal rankings (Chorus and Waltman 2016). Further research is needed to compare the JCR-indexed MPDI journals to similar journals in their respective fields in order to understand whether the level of self-citation is significantly different for MDPI published journals. ehttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-control-and-signal-processing. Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed open access scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. (, Shu F., Mongeon P., Haustein S., Siler K., Alperin J. P., Larivire V. (, Xia J., Harmon J. L., Connolly K. G., Donnelly R. M., Anderson M. R., Howard H. A. (2020) highlight, publishers could not explain not following best practices since there are settled by the industry principles for transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing. First, a proper systematic and structured overview of APC rates it is not available. It is important that academia and scholars become aware both of the risks of falling into the networks of predatory journals and, in addition, academics should be capable of properly identifying these journals, without presupposing that their inclusion in a prestigious database is a sort of quality hallmark that guarantees the integrity of their authorship, and both their peer-review and their editing processes (Severin and Low 2019; Cortegiani et al. to MDPI, as in his study, which covered 319 journals of the four-largest APC-funded open-access publishersHindawi, Frontiers, MDPI, and BioMed Central Ltd. (BMC)between 2012 and 2018, . Number of special issues of MDPI-journals (2018, 2019 and 2020). The COPE definition of predatory journals is no different in essence to the definition of Grudniewicz et al. Cortegiani et al. Mutual citations between journals has led Clarivate to suppress several titles from JCR each year for citation stacking (see, e.g. h-index) of their authors, generating inflated curricula and doped academic careers (Cortegiani, Manca and Giarratano, 2020a). As such the question arises whether or not this speed is achieved with a thorough peer review in line with editorial and publishing best practices or if the rigor and quality of the peer review process is compromised in order to achieve these speeds. The drop in the impact factor ranged between 38.96% in the case of Sustainability to 0.68% in Medicina with an average reduction of 14.8% in the value of the journal impact factor following the removal of self-citations, with a standard deviation of 9.31 (Figure 5). The promotion of questionable special issues is one of the identifying characteristics of predatory journals (Alrawadieh 2020). The high rate of self-citations of the journal Sustainability is coherent with data that the journal itself provided in its bibliometric review over the period 200918 (https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/5/1655), showing that Sustainability ranks first in citing journals (2,496 cites) very much over the Journal of Cleaner Production that occupies second position (658 cites) in this bibliographic review. The MDPI, with its headquarters in Basel (Switzerland), formerly known as Molecular Diversity Preservation International (https://www.mdpi.com/about/history) that launched its first two journals (Molecules and Mathematical and Computational Applications) in 1996, operates a gold open- access framework. 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