MDPI

MDPI AG

Type	Aktiengesellschaft (publicly held corporation)
Industry	Open access journals, Chemical library
Founded	2008
Headquarters	Basel, Switzerland
Key people	Shu-Kun Lin, Dietrich Rordorf
Website	www.mdpi.com

MDPI is an acronym shared by two related organizations nominally headquartered in Basel (Switzerland) and with larger offices in Beijing and Wuhan (China): Molecular Diversity Preservation International, an organization whose stated aim is to "preserve chemical samples for research," and MDPI AG (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute), a publisher of peer-reviewed open-access journals.^[1][2] It is considered a predatory open access publishing company publishing journals of dubious quality by Jeffrey Beall.^[3] The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) concluded an investigation in April 2014 stating that MDPI meets the OASPA Membership Criteria.^[4]

Molecular Diversity Preservation International

Chemical samples

Molecular Diversity Preservation International was founded and registered as a non-profit association (Verein) by Shu-Kun Lin and Benoit R. Turin in Basel in 1996 to enable the deposit and exchange of rare molecular and biomolecular research samples.^[5] The goal was to preserve the diversity of chemical compounds through the collection and storage of samples that could be made available to the scientific community for research purposes.^[6] This collection of samples was permanently transferred to the MDPI Sustainability Foundation in 2013, and Molecular Diversity Preservation International was dissolved. The collection of chemical samples is now operated by Molmall Sarl on behalf of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation.^[7]

Journals

The journal Molecules was established in 1996 in collaboration with Springer-Verlag (now Springer Science+Business Media) in order to document the chemical samples of the MDPI collection. Several other journals were established by the MDPI Verein, including Entropy (1999), the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (2000), Sensors (2001), Marine Drugs (2003) and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2004). The publisher MDPI AG was spun off from MDPI Verein in 2010.

Conferences

MDPI Verein co-organized several academic conferences, including the International Symposium on Frontiers in Molecular Science. It also runs virtual, electronic conferences, such as the Electronic Conference on Synthetic Organic Chemistry, which was started in 1997. In 2010 MDPI launched the platform Sciforum.net to host electronic conferences. In 2014, various electronic conferences were hosted in the areas of synthetic organic chemistry, material sciences, sensors and sustainability.

MDPI AG (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

Development

MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains three offshore editorial offices in China.^[5] MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles.^[8] Over fifty universities or institutes in Europe and the United States have joined the MDPI Institutional Membership Program, set up in the fourth quarter of 2013; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.^[9]

Journals

MDPI currently publishes more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific journals. As of January 2015, 27 journals have been accepted by Thomson Reuters for coverage in Web of Science^[10] and 23 life science-related journals are archived in PubMed Central.^[11] Thirty-nine journals are covered by Scopus and a further 12 by Compendex (EI). All articles published by MDPI since 2008 are released under the CC-BY Creative Commons license^[12] and are archived with the Swiss National Library.^[13]

Controversial articles

In December 2011, the MDPI journal Life published Erik D. Andrulis' theoretical paper, Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, aiming at presenting a framework to explain life.^[14] It attracted coverage by the popular science and technology magazines Ars Technica and Popular Science, which characterized it as "crazy"^[15] and "hilarious".^[16] A member of the editorial board of Life resigned in response.^[16][17] Publisher Lin defended the journal's editorial process, saying that the paper had been revised following lengthy reviews by two faculty members from institutions different from the author's.^[18]

In 2013, another MDPI journal, Entropy, published a review paper claiming glyphosate may be the most important factor in the development of obesity, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, cancer, and infertility.^[19] The paper itself does not contain any primary research results.^[19] It was criticized as pseudo-science by the popular science magazine Discover.^[20] With regard to the same controversial study, Jeffrey Beall has rhetorically asked, "Will MDPI publish anything for money?":^[21]

When publishers like MDPI disseminate research by science activists like Stephanie Seneff and her co-authors, I think it’s fair to question the credibility of all the research that MDPI publishes. Will MDPI publish anything for money?

A third instance of controversial publications is documented in the Australian paradox.

MDPI has published a statement in December 2013 as a response and defense on publishing controversial papers.^[22]

Inclusion in Beall's list

Jeffrey Beall added MDPI to his list of Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers in February 2014,^[23] based on his concerns that "MDPI's warehouse journals contain hundreds of lightly-reviewed articles that are mainly written and published for promotion and tenure purposes rather than to communicate science."^[24]

MDPI characterized Beall's comments as "an incompetent general critique" and alleged that the inclusion of MDPI on his list was motivated by a hostility towards open access publishing in general, noting that he had recently published a commentary on that theme.^[25][26]

Peter Murray-Rust, a chemist currently working at the University of Cambridge and an editorial board member of the-yet-to-be-started MDPI journal Data,^[27] criticized Beall's critique of MDPI as being "irresponsible" and lacking evidence.^[28]

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), investigated Beall`s allegations against MDPI and published its conclusions in April 2014, stating that "Based on our findings we feel satisfied that MDPI continue to meet the OASPA Membership Criteria".^[4] Beall nevertheless maintains MDPI on his list of questionable publishers, describing it as a "scholarly vanity press".^[21]

One of its journals had been targeted in the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting operation and rejected the fake paper.^[29] In 2014, MDPI's Life journal started featuring open peer review,^[30] which has been advocated as a transparency measure to combat predatory journals.^[31]

Further critique was raised by Martin Haspelmath who argues that the publication model employed by MDPI

"creates a strong incentive to create journals and book imprints that function like 'vanity presses,' allowing authors to publish their low-quality work without significant risk of rejection. [...] For example, I recently heard of two Chinese companies that are publishing a large number of open-access journals, some of them in my field of linguistics: Wuhan-based SCIRP ([...] over 250 journals) and Beijing-based MDPI ([...] over 120 journals). The business model here is to start a large number of new journals and to hope that some of them will succeed and bring profit. For example, MDPI's journal Languages does not even have an editor yet. This is of course reminiscent of the business model of spam e-mail, and in fact, some observers have warned of the danger of 'predatory journals.'"^[32]

Nobelists

Among the reasons Beall gave for adding MDPI to his list of questionable publishers was that the company "...claims that several Nobel Laureates serve on its editorial boards, but one investigation found that they didn’t realize they were listed."^[33] As evidence for this particular accusation, Beall pointed^[34] to a news story run by eCampus News.^[35] The original reporter later issued a correction^[36] and the newspiece was modified and appended with the following notice:^[37]

An earlier version of this article stated that Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Mario Capecchi was not aware he was listed as a member of the editorial board for the MDPI journal Biomolecules. At the time, Capecchi’s assistant, Lorene Stitzer, told eCampus News that “he was not aware of the fact that he had been included on the listing.” After being contacted by MDPI, Stitzer now says Capecchi is in fact aware of being an honorary board member. eCampus News regrets the error.

With regard to Beall's accusation about Nobel laureate Mario Capecchi not being aware that he was on the editorial board of the journal Biomolecules, MDPI posted a response stating that "the Editor-in-Chief of Biomolecules obtained a written confirmation from Professor Cappechi that he was indeed aware of his membership"; copies of such correspondence have been posted as well.^[38] MDPI's co-founder Dietrich Rordorf has compiled and posted emails claiming to document the acceptance by the following Nobelists as members of the board in MDPI journals: Robert F. Curl, Richard R. Ernst, Jerome Karle, Harold Kroto, Yuan-Tseh Lee, Rudolph A. Marcus, Eric S. Maskin, Steven Weinberg, and Kurt Wüthrich.^[38]

The uncorrected story has been picked up other media outlets, such as Veja, the leading weekly news magazine in Brazil.^[39]

See also

• Journals published by MDPI

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Media from MDPI journals.

• Official website , Molecular Diversity Preservation International
• Official website , Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
• MDPI Samples service