Fränti 2024, What is wrong with MDPI, predator or serious competitor?

Fränti P. “What is wrong with MDPI: Is it a predator or a serious competitor?” arXiv:2411.08051, 2024.

An analysis of the open-access publisher MDPI, examining whether its practices amount to predatory publishing or aggressive but legitimate competition. It documents the explosive growth of special issues, very short submission-to-acceptance times, and self-citation and guest-editor patterns that raise peer-review-quality questions, while acknowledging that MDPI also publishes large volumes of ordinary sound work. The verdict is “grey zone” rather than outright predatory: the rapid special-issue route creates systematic quality risk a reader must account for, so a paper should be weighted by venue, peer-review route and independent replication rather than by open-access status or publisher name alone.