By Abel Polese
This blog was originally published at The Research Whisperer on the 7th of March, 2023.
Recently, Zhejiang Gonggong University announced that articles published with MDPI, Frontiers Media & Hindawi, the three largest open access publishers, would not be included in research performance statistics.
Universities have discouraged or banned staff from publishing in individual journals in the past, but this is the first report of whole publisher catalogues being excluded. I’ve seen discussions about whether these journals are worth publishing or whether they should be considered predatory. I’m concerned that the boundary between a predatory approach and the approach of pay-as-you-go journals is blurring.
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