[ABE-L] Revistas predatórias

Dom Mar 12 16:10:26 -03 2023

Boa tarde Francisco e Colegas,

Obrigado pela partilha dessa informação.

Há uns dois ou três meses também teve essa discussão na lista de emails da
Internationa Biometric Society. Tomo a liberdade de copiar abaixo a minha
posição sobre esse assunto. Esse comentário aborda vários tópicos
usualmente questionados (tamanho dos corpos editoriais, self-citations, os
special issues, o tempo de resposta com pareceres dos revisores, os
publication fees, entre outros).

Estou totalmente em desacordo com os elevados cursos de publicação, mas
vejam abaixo o meu exemplo da "Scientific Reports" do grupo Springer Nature
(editora de origem Alemã e Inglesa). E essa nunca sequer foi sequer
cogitada a entrar nessa lista. Porque será?

Mas penso que o mais relevante é nos perguntarmos o seguiste: *Será que se,
em vez de ser uma editora chinesa, se fosse propriedade de uma empresa dos
Estados Unidos, Inglesa ou Alemã também seria colocado nessa lista de
revistas predatórias?*

Do meu ponto de vista é óbvio que nenhuma revista open access é (nem será!)
minimamente eficiente quando comparada a qualquer revista do MDPI. E isso
deve estar dando muito prejuízo às editoras que dominavam o mercado...

Ah, eu não tenho nenhum conflito de interesse no mundo das editoras. Apenas
com os "double standards" :)

Um abraço,
Paulo.

As for MDPI, I will strongly disagree with Vincent and Clelia. I cannot
comment on the example that Vincent reported happening with some colleagues
in Spain, but I can share my experience. I have published maybe five papers
in the journals of this MDPI publisher (and there is nothing to be embarrassed
about, Louise!), and got a couple rejected. I am on the editorial board of
one of them and have reviewed several papers (with the same look and
exigence as I do for any other journal). I am and have been editor and
associate editor in journals of other publishers and have not seen one as
professional and efficient. They (MDPI) have a (surely very profitable)
business model and know how to do things efficiently. I can give a few
examples:

   - I am a Co-Editor of a "good" journal that receives about 600 papers
   annually. The Editors sometimes have to check whether the Associate Editors
   have done their part in assigning reviewers. But we are three, have to deal
   with 200 papers each, and have many other things to do. Sometimes we get
   emails from the authors asking about a paper submitted five or six months
   before. We go to the submission system and realize that the Associate
   Editor in charge of that submission has been inactive, and the process that
   should have ended long ago is still in the beginning. This will never
   happen in any of the MDPI journals I have had contact with. The people in
   the editorial office (those actually paid to work for the
   journal/publisher!) are pressuring the reviewers to send their reports.
   - They have decided on large editorial boards (this can be questioned),
   but they include worldwide known researchers
   - About self-citations, I took the MDPI with the highest impact factor
   (the name of the journal is "Cells" and its Impact Factor is 7.666). Then,
   I went to Scimago and discovered that in 2021 it had 25.986 citations and
   1.389 self-citations (~5.3%). Could have been lower, but I am sure that we
   can find many "reputable" journals with similar levels. Of course, this is
   just an example, and the percentages can be different in other MDPI
   journals.
   - In my experience as an author, associate editor, and reviewer of MDPI
   journals, I have never been asked to cite any paper published in MDPI. This
   happened to me a couple of times long ago, and it was in journals of
   well-known publishers and not MDPI.
   - They use the Special Issue strategy that Louise mentioned, and it
   works. They attract very high-level papers with that. I do not see anything
   wrong with that.
   - The reviewers have strict deadlines to send the reports (between 10
   and 15 days on the first submission; and 3-5 days on revised submissions).
   I do not know about you, but if I get three months to review a paper, I
   often do so in the last week. If I get 10 days, I will also do it in the
   last week. This makes the submission/publication process very fast and
   efficient.
   - The authors pay all the costs in this business model, but the
   reviewers also get discount vouchers for future publications in the
   publisher's journals.
   - They charge high publication fees. In my opinion too high. But also,
   the journals that Clelia mentioned (Nature, Science, PNAS, PLOS) and many
   others do charge publication fees and are much higher than MDPI. Trying to
   argue that one group of journals deserves to charge publication fees and
   the other not because it becomes predatory is just nonsense. We can all
   find many papers published in Scientific Reports that should not be in a ~5
   impact factor journal. By the way, Scientific Reports (an example given by
   Clelia, which charges high publication fees) published 23.730 papers in
   2021. Considering that the publication fee is US$ 2,190, this represents
   US$ 51,968,700! *Yes, 52 million US Dollars in publication fees in 2021
   alone! How come this is not even thought of as predatory?*

These are just some facts. As a disclaimer, I have no business with MDPI. I
only admire the efficiency they deal with the submission process. And I
have this crazy idea that John Lennon Imagine(d).

I wonder with myself if the MDPI would not be Chinese and would be owned by
someone at Cambridge, Oxford, or LA, keeping the exact same business model.
Would it even be lightly considered predatory, or have its quality been
questioned?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Paulo Canas Rodrigues
*Professor and Head*, Department of Statistics, Federal University of Bahia
<http://ufba.br>, Brazil
*President-Elect,* International Society for Business and
<https://www.isbis-isi.org/>Industrial Statistics
<https://www.isbis-isi.org/>
*(Founding) Chair*, SIG on Data Science, of the International Statistical
Institute <https://www.isi-web.org/>
*Past-President*, Brazilian Region of the International Biometric Society
<http://www.rbras.org.br/>
*Vice-Coordinator*, Specialization in Data Science and Big Data
<http://ecd.ufba.br>
*Member of the Board of Directors, *Brazilian Statistical Association
<https://www.redeabe.org.br/>
*Editor for*: CompStat <https://www.springer.com/journal/180>, SOIC
<http://www.iapress.org/index.php/soic>, Biom. Letters
<http://www.up.poznan.pl/biometrical.letters/>, Braz. J. Biom.
<http://www.biometria.ufla.br/index.php/BBJ>

*CV Lattes*: http://lattes.cnpq.br/0029960374321970
*Web*: www.paulocanas.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------

On Sun, Mar 12, 2023 at 3:46 PM Francisco Cribari <cribari em de.ufpe.br>
wrote:

> Caros colegas,
>
> As revistas publicadas pela editora MDPI entraram (novamente) para a lista
> de revistas predatórias; ver
>
> https://predatoryreports.org/news/f/list-of-all-mdpi-predatory-publications
>
> Ver também
>
> https://predatoryreports.org/news/f/mdpi-peer-review-problem
>
> e
>
> https://predatoryreports.org/news/f/comparing-mdpi-and-scirp-practices
>
> Para detalhes sobre a editora MDPI, ver
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI
>
> Para detalhes sobre o são publicações predatórias, ver
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing
>
> Sei que o assunto é polêmico e que ele não envolve apenas essa editora.
> Sei também que há alguns artigos de ótima qualidade costumeiramente
> publicados nessas revistas. Penso, contudo, ser relevante que o assunto
> seja discutido, inclusive no âmbito das agências financiadoras (CAPES,
> CNPq, FAPs, etc.). Alguém saberia dizer se há discussões desse teor em
> andamento?
>
> Se desejarem, por favor, compartilhem suas opiniões sobre o tema, de
> preferência sem culpar o mensageiro pela notícia.
>
> Saudações, FC
>
> --
> Francisco Cribari-Neto, email: cribari em de.ufpe.br - "All theory, my
> friend, is gray, but green is life's glad golden tree." --Goethe (Faust)
> _______________________________________________
> abe mailing list
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> https://lists.ime.usp.br/listinfo/abe
>
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