Is MDPI a reputable publisher?

To Simón Roa: Perhaps you may check this post:

Btw, there are a few more similar posts here on R^G platform...

Actually the MDPI is highly standard Journals in the world. The headquarter is in Switzerland.

As long as with Europeans that the standard was maintained.

When they association with sub-standard professionals have made it as a business.

There after, it's name become like any other Journals.

One cannot survive long with name and fame but they have to expose their talent and capabilities forever.

There are many outstanding Journals in the current scenario.

One has to equally competent enough can survive in the Publication world.

It has become biased and favour for some sections of the people.

What a weird claim, Simón Roa

Do you believe all 165K peer-reviews are of poor quality? Different journals within this corporation have different fees, and open-access policies, as well as reaching for a peer review is always an individual experience. It is weird for a scientist to judge such an aggregation of journals as a whole and claim the processes are not rigorous and poor.

From the MDPI Annual Report 2020:

In 2020, MDPI journals continued to have a considerable impact in the open-access publications market. With the support of our authors, reviewers and academic editors, MDPI achieved great success in many aspects:

their indices are not bad. usually times for reviews are very tight and comments are concise (at least this is my experience with 3 submitted manuscripts). While, on theother side, if you make too brief a review, some editors also urge you to provide more explanations

Yes it is

MDPI is a very popular publisher but the APC is so high i.t. I think it is not a suitable journal.

Yes it is quiet reputable.

i'm of course MDPI publisher works but not too sure to make an opinion!

I do agree with you about the considerable charging fee of MDPI journals. However, this publication has a wide variety of journals and readers. Besides, many journals of this pub are Q2 or even Q1 journals and indexed in scopous. However, the review process of some journals is not standard.

Yes if cours i have published a research article in this group of journal. I think that reviewing process was respected with comments and queries.

APC is too high and published very prompt, I think it's the weak point of MDPI.

Dear Simón Roa ,

MDPI is inescapably one of the best publisher in the world, very qualitative, and probably the fastest. APC are high but they are used to make the process quicker, they pay the best reviewers, invited editors...etc.

They are using a smart system represented by special editions, and everyone is taking benefits from this, visibility is greatly increased and you will increase the chances of being cited, they have nothing to do with a predatory editor.

Good luck.

Sure, and it is very trusted and indexed..

Dear Simon Roa,

I completely agree with Mr Emad Kamil, and if you ask people who already published an article with MDPI journals, they will certainly tell you that MDPI is a

reputable publisher (even if their journals are not first-class). However, their reviewing process is very smooth.

You should also know that their reviewers are choosen carefully which is very important.

Best wishes,

Sabri

Reputed publisher because of the quick timeline

MDPI is a trusted and reputable publisher

Yes MDPI is good but charges are very high

May be I am not sure about it

MDPI is a reputable publisher.

It is a good journal but I agree with the rest that the APC is rather too high.

I agree with colleagues

Dear colleagues,

Does anyone have MDPI vouchers? We have 800 CHF, we need between 600 and 800 CHF to publish in an indexed (WoS and Scopus) journal.

Obviously you will be co-author with us.

Please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards.

Yes, it is a reputable publisher, fast, but charges high.

Before answer the question, we need to ask a fundamental question first. What does "Reputable publisher" mean?. If the reputation is based on the opinions of the researchers, then you will find heterogeneous responses mostly based on our experiences which tend to be biased as well. Scientists can make their decisions based on their "good" or "bad" experiences with the publisher or journal.

If reputable means to be indexed and recognised by an indexing body (i.e., Web of Science or Scopus), then you can probably get some objective and evaluation-based responses. If you ask me, as long as a journal is indexed in Web of Science, preferably Q1/Q2 (unrelated to the impact factor of the journal), I would submit the manuscript. I would trust Clarivate (Web of Science) more than a publisher/journal.

Hope this helps.

Dr Asiful

Most MDPI journals are indexed in reputable databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, Pubmed, Crossref, NCBI, etc., and they provide quality peer review.

Yes, I have published in one of them.

You are right, it is okay but not a good publisher.

It has high APC. It can publish easily.

Dear Simon,

Of course, MDPI is one of the best and most recognized publisher, but also very appreciated by the scientific community (very fast and indexed in reputable databases).

Good luck

Yes , it is very famous and popular publisher but APC is very high

Sure it is reputable.

The main point is that most of MDPI's journals are indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, which is enough to say with full confidence: yes it is reputable.

Very good question Simón Roa

I had the same question running through my mind yesterday as I was going through some systematic literature reviews on "vaccine hesitancy/uptake." Net, I also want to get some guidance on this one.

I don’t think MDPI is a promising publisher. Although the review speed of its journals is very fast, the quality is not good enough. Many people are willing to submit papers to a MDPI journal because papers are published quickly and easily accepted, which can meet the academic evaluation demands based on the number of papers.

I personally do not interact with any MDPI Journal as I believe they engage in predatory practices. This is debatable- I personally find them a bit scummy and I don't care for their spam and business model.

However a few individuals have written well researched and thoughtful takes on MDPI:

Dan Brockington's take is excellent:

M Ángeles Oviedo-García has published on MDPI as a predatory journal, but MDPI reacted strongly:

Not much, but it is open access so you can have a number of citations for sure.

nope, profit earning machines

I fully agree and support the opinion of our distinguished colleagues Senapathy Marisennayya, Ahasan Ullah Khan. Thanks for the important information!

MDPI is the greatest scientific articles publiser in all over the globe because of their fast article processing

Personally, I don't like MDPI and some professors I know avoid MDPI journals.

This is a very topical issue. I fully support the opinion of our distinguished colleague Faraed Salman. Thanks!

I'm here in this thread looking for information because I just downloaded a paper on eDNA from MDPI's Biology journal ( ), and I can hardly stand to read it, the English grammar is appalling, it's like it's never been edited. Is this typical of MDPI's journals, and if so, can we trust the content?

I have recently sent an article I was surprised by the professionalism and the speed of the review. the impact of the journal involved was almost 6 which is also impressive.

I also read their articles which are of qual

so overall my opinion is very positive

You can have all the money in the world and double-pay for APC - a poor-quality paper will never be admitted for publication to MDPI Journals. First, each journal provides a template on which you must format your paper and you must pay attention to all the details: from the writing of the manuscript to editing the references. It is a standard imposed since the manuscript writing. Then comes the verification of the quality and novelty of the study that you send for publication. When you have an article in an MDPI journal, you cannot say that it can be easily published there; that means a lot of effort from the beginning. When our team aims to send a paper to MDPI, we perform an appropriate design of our research in the first step, thinking about the sequence of studies, the performance of methods used, and then their writing, editing, and discussion. There is nothing accidental or simple to do when you want to publish in MDPI Journals. And also I think the speed of reviewing a manuscript is sometimes welcome. There are situations in which you do not have time to wait, targeting a certain number of publications in a relatively short time. For example, you are involved in a postdoctoral program, and in only one year you target 2-3 ISI articles; you work for those studies for 7-8 months, and in the remaining 4-5 months, you have to write the papers and see them as published. Are you still able to achieve your goal, if the average period from submission to publication in the selected journals is 3-6 months?

> "There are situations in which you do not have time to wait"

It is, unfortunately, true and is becoming a common practice in academia but not scientific.

I see a lot of good papers published in MDPI journals but obliging authors to pay for open access is not a good sign and if the publisher trusts the quality of the papers it publishes, it should not worry about the necessity of making them openly accessible.

MDPI claims that this helps readers have access to recently published articles but at the same time it burdens the authors (in some or maybe most of the developing countries, authors pay those fees by themselves).

Zeyd Boukhers

Nobody says it's easy. The work we do is not easy either - and I am also referring to the situation in developing countries; we take responsibility for our choice. However, if the authors persevere and their works are valuable, the MDPI Editors' appreciation consists of APC payment discounts, which can be substantial.

Thank you, everyone, for your good comments and observations. I feel better about MDPI now, but I still desperately wish they would hire a competent editor of English to give some papers the credibility they deserve.

It is very important Journal in the World and it has good impact factor .

The following information may be related to this discussion. FYI

Additionally, I cannot see any improvement, scientific content, better morality, or ethics in some papers or journals that try to have the arrogance to evaluate publishers or journals that publish papers with scientific contents that such authors or editors will never be able to understand. There is absolutely no visible scientific content in these self-called evaluation papers and in these journals, just apparently fake science and fake morality. They call themselves pompously as the science of science, which is in fact a vicious internal circle without any real scientific understanding or development. Most of the authors, editors and librarians that write or publish about predatory journals and predatory publishers claim frequently for ethics, when in fact basic merit and the ethics seem exactly what are missing in what they write or publish.

The article costs appear to be the only thing that matters for at least some of their journals; if this philosophy continues, they might develop a reputation for having very low standards, if they haven't already (rejected the last paper I reviewed for them but they published anyway with positive "reviews" I found very suspect). Did publish a review with them a couple of years ago and was impressed by the process, but that opinion has changed drastically.

I am extremely surprised at the overwhelmingly positive comments in this response thread. I am adding this response to balance the question's responses, as this comes up highly in Google SEO.

I ran a poll asking hundreds their impression on various publishers (PLOS, Springer, BMC, Frontiers, and MDPI). Quite specifically, and overwhelmingly (>90% of respondents!) said MDPI was predatory/quasi-predatory. See: https://mahansonresearch.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/3/6/123603726/percentvoteshare_orig.png

Why would there be such negative connotation so strong and specific towards MDPI (Frontiers is no saint either, but the two are in different leagues re: reputation it seems)?

MDPI has, just in the last few years (since ˜2016) gone from obscure publishing group to a rapidly-emerging article force. But this push has come with some caveats, most importantly: the time from initial submission to acceptance for literally all journals has rapidly shifted from 2016, going from an expected stochasticity of different journals with different disciplines, to basically all journals accepting manuscripts ˜35 days after initial submission (including revisions!). The consistent bell curve across such diverse subject types is eery. See "Lag from submission to acceptance at top MDPI journals" this analysis: https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publisher/

Such patterns reinforce the entrenched reputation that MDPI has for largely theatric peer review. There are good and bad reviewers that might heed the call of a review request, but MDPI's editors make no effort to sort the wheat from the chaff. This causes a highly variable review integrity from experience to experience, with many reviewers seeing articles published that totally ignored their important comments, and many authors that have shared laughable review experiences totally lacking in substance (see: https://danbrockington.com/2021/04/18/mdpi-experience-survey-results/).

This massive shift in publication times comes alongside an aggressive push for special issues, truly removing all semblance of the word 'special' from the name (see prev Crosetto link again). As a consequence across all journals, MDPI has a nearly 30% rate of self-citation of MDPI papers to other MDPI papers (a disproportionate outlier); those data come from MDPI themselves in response to an article criticizing their in-network citation practices (see: https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/2979 and the attached .png emphasizing MDPI's outlier status). MDPI said "ah, but that's normal. We're totally in line with other publishers" - they're totally not, as this graphic that MDPI THEMSELVES MADE makes abundantly clear.

The incredible sketchiness of MDPI's publication and self-citation practice is emphasized by an analysis of my own, that found MDPI drastically inflates its impact factor through these self-citations, with 'impact factor inflation' rivalled only by overtly predatory publishing groups like Bentham Science and IGI Global: https://mahansonresearch.weebly.com/blog/what-is-a-predatory-publisher-anyways

Here 'impact factor inflation' refers to the disproportionate MDPI journal Impact Factors compared to other impact metrics like SciMago Journal Rank.

MDPI has made a goldmine out of appealing to scientists' necessity to publish or perish, and to their vanity by asking them to host and contribute to Special Issues (with promise of article fee waivers for editors, at no genuine cost to the company). By no means is any journal group a saint in this realm, but MDPI is leading the pack of unsavoury practice.

MDPI journals are frequently critiqued by major international bodies that specifically out MDPI as pseudo-predatory (e.g. Norwegian Scientific Index, Chinese Academy of Science). A recent study uncovered MDPI lead editor involvement in a Russian paper mill, publishing many articles across four MDPI journals that were selling authorship slots for up to $5000 (see: )

It is so bad that some MDPI journals have lost the status of "academic journal" in the Nordic Kanal Register, and the Czech U of South Bohemia has told its faculty of science that publications in MDPI journals would not be supported, and may not count towards evaluations (see the MDPI wikipedia page for a summary of their many controversies and pushback from the research community).

I'm sorry, but the above answers are drastically out of touch with the reality of MDPI's precarious dance between credibility and predatory practice. They have slick websites and typesetting algorithms that give the air of professionalism, and their reviewers are a grab-bag of credible authors and whoever responds to the algorithm's random emails. I have been petitioned by MDPI to contribute to a litany of special issues on a wide range of topics I have no expertise in (cancer, climate change, epidemiology, covid) coming from many journals, akin to the random calls of predatory publishers. Such practices have gotten MDPI into trouble on more than one occasion, as every now and then they publish something that actually picks up attention beyond their self-citation circle, and controversy follows. The most recent example being the junk article on Covid vaccines doing more harm than good in the fight against Covid (published in Vaccines, one of MDPI's 'better' journals in terms of having a lower self-citation rate). Otherwise this strategy mostly results in flooding their journals with low-impact work that is ignored by the larger community; a so-called 'vanity press'.

Whoever is reading this, there is a lot wrong with academic publishing right now and the research community is grasping for a way forward. All I can say is that MDPI's practice is the worst direction to take. If nothing more, take the overwhelming sentiment of the research community at face value: MDPI is a predatory/quasi-predatory publisher that folks steer clear from unless they've already published with MDPI.

To me, the surprisingly fast review process seems like a red flag. Almost every paper from MDPI that I came across, the time from first submission till final acceptance was mostly 1 month! It is hard for me to believe that a genuine peer-review process was performed in that short time frame.

@Mark Austin Hanson your poll and reply is really mind boggling and like you rightly said, there may be no saint after all as far as this issue is concerned. I however do find MDPI reputable, my rating (although there may be many other rating criteria) is based solely on the quality of articles I get from the publishers in my area of specialization.

MDPI journals are fine to publish. There are some very reputable journals among them.

This is an article from 2018 about a group of editors quitting because they were pressured to publish sub-standard papers

I agree with you @ Martin Danaher. A lot of people rate a journal by the time taken for a review and term it as "rigorous" while some times it as a result of a delay on the part of the editor in sending out the manuscript for review.

I've recently realized that these journals effectively publish articles of lower quality considering their quartile...

Martin Danaher I don't agree it takes <1 day to write a good* review. Sure I can read a paper and write a review in 4 hours. On occasion I do even, if the paper is good and I get to just say 'this is a great paper". But will I have time the same day I get the email? No, probably not. Especially true for PIs and the experts in the field that you want* reviewing a given paper. A 1-day turnaround time, as if highly-skilled researchers will always just drop everything and review whatever someone sends to their inbox? No way.

And if there ARE issues with the article, if I'm doing my job, I'll read it carefully, I'll write my points, and I'll take a day or two, i.e. I wait before making an important decision like requesting revisions/rejecting someone's paper. That affects someone else's life (possibly months to years of work). I'll reconsider my points and focus on what's most important: what are my biggest requests? Is the study 'right enough' that, even if my experiment requests didn't work out, would it still stand on its own? If so, do I need to request them?

I'll double check my language to make sure I'm not being overly aggressive, but also clear about issues. I'll do my job as a peer reviewer to make the review's critiques clear, but also constructive.

I'm not sitting there for a week thinking about the study alone. But if I'm doing my job, I should let it percolate to know what is the right decision. It's literally impossible to do that in 1 day.

As an editor, reviewer and author, this is my expectation for the review process. Even with highly reputable journals, with so many layers to the review process a good review can take weeks from start to finish — in part due to the time a reviewer requires, but also due to the potential for complications and delays at It passes through every set of hands.

I would be very cautious any journal that promises fast turnaround times.

MDPI behaves in exactly the same way as many other emblazoned publishers, think profit. The quality of revisions depends fundamentally on the choice of reviewers, who are often not always the most competent for reasons of the number of submissions and time. There is too much pressure to publish a lot and quickly, and this is affecting the quality of research in general.

MDPI behaves in exactly the same way as many other emblazoned publishers, think profit. The quality of revisions depends fundamentally on the choice of reviewers, who are often not always the most competent for reasons of the number of submissions and time. There is too much pressure to publish a lot and quickly, and this is affecting the quality of research in general.

MDPI behaves in exactly the same way as many other emblazoned publishers, think profit. The quality of revisions depends fundamentally on the choice of reviewers, who are often not always the most competent for reasons of the number of submissions and time. There is too much pressure to publish a lot and quickly, and this is affecting the quality of research in general.

Being reviewer for almost every reputable publisher (including Elsevier, Springer, etc.) I can state without any hesitation that with MDPI and with others I spend the exact time to carry out my revision which is about a week or ten days between I first open the pdf and the day I conclude it. I do not agree that a rigorous review takes months as I do not believe that any researcher just dedicate all of her/his time by pausing all the research that she/he has been carrying out.

The bottom line is that I accept MDPI reviews only when I believe I can start reviewing immediately.

Thank you to everyone for their input on this topic, especially those based on their experience as authors or reviewers. I must confess, however, that I'm still stuck with the fact that the English of some MDPI papers is, frankly, appalling, and certainly this must reflect on the ability of the reviewers' in English. This is just not a colonial issue which we must put aside because many of us do not speak English as their first language. No, it's a very serious, and sometimes fatal, problem because it impacts the precision of scientific communication and thus its results.

Several times I have come back to MPDI papers which are absolutely unreadable because of the standard of English. Try, for example, BanerjeeP, et al (2021) Biology, 10(12):1223. ttps://doi.org/10.3390/biology10121223. The topic is of great interest, it looks like the research was of a high standard, and yet the English of the paper is of such a standard as to make it unreadable--and if one insists on persevering to read--incapable of communicating anything meaningful. This paper should have been sent to an English language editor (probably before submission), but for it to get through the system without even reasonable English does a disservice, not only to those of us wanting to access this research but also to the authors and their hard work.

Sorry, MDPI, you've lost me.

I appreciate David Price's comments. This is a very interesting discussion, and I see it as potentially very constructive.

As an editor of and reviewer for English-language journals, I regularly confront the issue of English writing quality. Minor problems with English are common, even with English-speaking authors. These are normally dealt with very effectively through the editing/reviewing process.

The problem is elevated to major status when the poor English quality makes the science unclear. If this is the case, the manuscript is returned to the author for rewriting before it is considered for review. In the past with some journals, assistance with English or guidance on getting assistance has been provided -- I don't know if this is a practise anymore. As an editor, the last thing you want is to consume the valuable time of the reviewers struggling with the authors' English -- they should be focused on the quality of the science. That being said, the situation is often grey, rather than black or white when it comes to being English being a major or minor problem.

As an author and reviewer for, and reader of articles in MDPI journals, I agree with David Price that the quality of English of what ends up in print is a great concern, as there are often minor problems with the English, and too often major problems. There is no question that MDPI's desire to process manuscripts very quickly comes at the expense of the quality of English, and if there are problems with the English, as a reader, I assume that there are likely problems with the science, and this impacts the credibility of the MDPI journals and all of those who publish in them.

Even with these concerns, I still see value in MDPI journals because of their breadth of readership as much as the speed in their processing articles. I just wish that they would work harder on improving their editorial practices -- they may need to allow for a more lengthy and robust review process.

* I noted in the discussion that the quality of English in the many replies correlated well with strength of support for MDPI journals...

While I'd go back and take a look at my full explanation on Page 7 (which is just shy of the needed recommendations to get into the top comments and provide some much-needed balance to this RG answer's initial impressions), it might be worth repeating that MDPI is largely viewed as a predatory/pseudo-predatory publisher.

These survey data comes from a Twitter poll of just under 200 respondents asking general impressions on a variety of publishers. This is not a one-off poll, almost every systematic poll that asks folks for their opinion on MDPI finds overwhelming consensus that MDPI uniquely has issues (see Dan Brockington's blog for some good examples, link on Page 7 of this thread). If you get your impressions from comment threads, where vocal advocates for/against skew the perspective, you'll miss out on the fact that the community consensus is overwhelming: MDPI is not respected publishing group - at least not by anyone who doesn't already publish with MDPI...

For poll context, see: https://mahansonresearch.weebly.com/blog/what-is-a-predatory-publisher-anyways

With regard to the poor and imprecise English of many MDPI papers, they're not the only ones. Just this morning I received an alert for a Frontiers paper of interest but here too the quality of English is appalling, making reading difficult and probably misleading. Really, if a journal doesn't enforce a reasonable standard of English (or whatever language of the journal) then those papers are fairly worthless, at least to me.

An important emphasis and competent assistance to the Authors in the English language of the submissions has been always given in the Editorial procedure of the MDPI Journals which whom I collaborated so far, but naturally that more important than the language has been always (and correctly) the scientific accuracy of the presentations and the scientific contents of the submissions.

Being native English speakers, or having born in developed countries does not make (“per se”) researchers to be better scientists, better persons, or their manuscripts be more proficient, as everybody should know or can easily see. Unacceptable generalisations, fallacies, arrogance and pseudo-elitist discourses does not seem reasonable in a scientific research environment of Excellency.

Fortunately that there are currently many language tools available to everyone, since on-line dictionaries, language translators up to language correctors that can assist freely and democratically all researchers/scholars from any part of the world to communicate the results of their research.

Very probably the problem for some pseudo-scientific researchers, regardless if they are native English speakers or not, is not exactly the English language, but simply the lack of scientific culture, lack of scientific humility and even lack of elementary scientific background in the specific areas where they claim or believe to be experts. This may explain the disrespectful behaviour that they seem to demonstrate sometimes, particularly either as Editors or as Reviewers, with the submissions, particularly those authored by non-native English speakers.

I have been a reviewer for at least 10 MDPI publications, and I can state that half of the cases were the worst experience I had as a reviewer. In three cases, the paper was awful, and I rejected it. I can see that other reviewers also agreed with me. Yet, the editor insisted on a second round of revision. In the other two cases, in the second round, the authors didn't make any substantial changes, as requested, and the paper was published anyway. Saying this, the remaining articles I reviewed were good, and there are very relevant people publishing high-quality papers in MDPI journals. I will simply not because I prefer to target journals that never let me down (even if I disagreed with the scientific arguments of some of the reviewers or the editor's decision).

Since I have read so many bad things, I wanted to share my experience here with MPDI.

I have published my first article with MPDI and all in all it was a really intensive review process including 4 reviewers. One reviewer rejected my original draft for several reasons and the other three approved of it, but I needed to make one major revision and two minor revisions. After those first three revisions, where I needed to add a lot of information and my article got pretty long, the editors rejected the article because of its length. Like this they would not be able to publish it. So I rewrote it again in a much shorter version. Again this was reviewed twice (three reviewers) and finally it was approved for publication. I need to say that I learned a lot in regards to writing a research article thanks to the review process. In my case the reviewers did do a great job, even though I needed to spend so many hours on rewriting and researching literature again. But it improved my article in many ways. So, at least in my case, I can disagree on the non-rigorous process. It is true that the revisions came back really quickly. Maybe between 3 to 10 days. But in any case..not the time needed, but the reply is what matters most. For me it was good that they made it so quickly. In the end they also adapted some sentences in regards to englisch spelling. The publication went smoothly. But I am interessted now how it goes with another journal, where I will submit to in the future.

I am to new in this field in order to judge if it is worse or equal to other journals, but at least I can say that the review-process was good with good comments.

I do not know about MDPI as a publisher overall, but some of the journals, cannot be even mentioned as such. I have a growing collection of supposed journal articles which have actually been published and to put it diplomatically most are: -----simple plagiarisms

-fabricated data

-PMO (paper mill origin)

-Fake authorships

- Co-authorship payments

In the review process it seems that editors and reviewers did not even bother to put the manuscripts through detection software like Turnitin for example. Further some of the data and information provided is so clearly fraudulent and invented it is beyond belief. Supposed authors, who are very well known for buying co-authorships, get regularly published and no questions asked. Moreover, some very well known charlatans also get published, simply be paraphrasing other peoples work and do not even bother to change the references!!!!! For example recently a paper was published by some well known charlatan authors and the paper was simply a long paraphrase of a conference paper provided by other authors who had no idea their conference paper had been paraphrased and published. Examples go on and on and on. However and overall MDPI, as per the many posts on the web and social media, always provides for a lot of controversy, which seemingly other publishers do not have at the the degree that MDPI gets.

MDPI is a high standard Journal in the world.

Yes, They do peer review. However, I believe they would consider publishing papers with low levels of novelties.

and with an APC !! MDPI discriminates what we call 2030SDG!

No.

Good discussion in here: https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publisher/

NOT at ALL. Very bad publisher

My experience is only as a reviewer. Someone earlier said "...their reviewers are choosen carefully which is very important", which couldn't be further from the truth, in my opinion. I've been invited to review countless articles that are so far outside my field that I am not even sure exactly how they came across my name - clearly not "carefully" chosen. I've had to reject many because I've published with the authors in the last year (an obvious conflict of interest that any editor should catch if they are paying attention). I get asked to be a guest editor for special issues constantly -- usually not relevant to my field. So, in my opinion MDPI is not reputable overall and seem a bit predatory (you will find lots of discussion of this elsewhere), but I recognize that MDPI makes up many, many journals and clearly there are good people involved as well.

The MDPI has become a business machine, they lack rigorous peer review and publish articles with no contributions and novelty at all. Most of the papers are either reports on a specific topic or replicas. The only thing they care about is money, that's all. I prefer no publication over publishing with the MDPI.