MDPI: Exposing the Faultlines of Scientific Societies

MDPI exposes the faultlines of scientific societies. A mere mention of an MDPI journal may trigger a flood of strong opinions. For example, take a look at the recent debate on the AboutHydrology platform. https://groups.google.com/g/abouthydrology/c/M2Bt68UEchw?pli=1:

To whoever it may concern, I will share my experience with MDPI here. I have co-authored four papers in MDPI. The backgrounds for each of them is different.

1. My IITH student submitted a manuscript to WRR and received highly positive comments from three reviewers. Oddly, the Associate Editor (AE) recommended “rejection with encouragement to resubmit,” when a moderate revision would have been sufficient. Without suspecting the AE's intentions, we addressed the review comments and resubmitted the revised manuscript. To my surprise, we received another rejection letter. After reading a few lines, I realized that none of the original reviewers had received the revised manuscript. I protested. The AE literally said we should consider it a favor that she had secured “six high-quality” reviews for us. The editor also sent a generic, bot-like reply supporting the AE. I understood the underlying message: “someone from a third-world country doesn’t matter to us.” Let's be real -- peer recognition for someone working in India only comes after overcoming the huge barrier of racism, especially when the work challenges established scientists in the West.

Since the student’s fellowship was about to end and IITH was putting a lot of pressure on us to publish before allowing the thesis submission, we needed to get the work published quickly. My colleague, Bellie Sivakumar, who was the Editor-in-Chief of Hydrology at the time, informed me that MDPI’s review process was quite fast. We chose Hydrology primarily because it had a nominal APC. The manuscript received feedback from two reviewers. One provided reasonable comments. The second reviewer tried to appear tough, but the comments were quite easy to address. What really surprised me was that Bellie said he had no idea about our manuscript. We guessed that, since we had co-authored together, the MDPI office decided not to send the manuscript to him.

However, the main reason I was comfortable with MDPI is that I believe the quality of the work should matter more than the quality of the journal. If the work is good, it doesn’t need validation from a journal. As Marco suggested in another post, "let time be the judge of our work." We provided a quantitative proof supporting the hypothesis that regionalization is not very useful when gauging station density is poor (see attached image). The paper is here for you to judge: https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5338/6/2/32

2. The pressure to publish before submitting their PhD thesis led another IITH student to submit a manuscript to Geoscience. I would say the quality of the review comments was decent. The paper makes an important point: GRACE data is quite noisy, and we are better off using streamflow data for storage information. You can read the paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/10/10/404. Note that our co-author on this paper is quite well recognized for his work on GRACE.

3. We developed a new method for flood-inundation mapping using CYGNSS. My IITB student, Kesav, attended a conference in Dubai where he met some leading figures working on CYGNSS. Since several of their works were published in Remote Sensing, we decided to submit our work there as well. My Australian collaborator had funding available, so there were no issues on that front. The quality of the review comments was as good as we could expect from any other journal. Here is the paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/18/3026.

4. For some reason, Kesav received a coupon to publish for free in a special issue on Geohydrological Risk Management in the journal Geoscience. We decided to submit a follow-up work on our flood-inundation model development there. Our modified flood-inundation model performed very well in simulating a flood event in Sydney. Our Austrian collaborators also expressed interest in publishing in the same issue. The review experience was average. Here is the paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/13/3/67.

Overall, the perceived relevance or irrelevance of MDPI hardly bothers me. I may not publish another article in MDPI for a long time, mainly because I am not interested in paying the high APCs. It is not that I cannot arrange the money; I consider it unethical to waste taxpayers’ money on publishing a paper. To make my work accessible to those who cannot access my papers, my new policy is to upload manuscripts in a preprint server before submitting it to a journal for review. As I mentioned in my other post, I would be happy to see the peer-review system completely crumble. There’s no point in fixing a system that is rotten to the core. We can surely find a better alternative for sharing knowledge: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/basudev-biswal-53677560_fixing-the-knowledge-society-episode-24-activity-7243187498321924096-sARl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop