Some remarks on open access publishing

[Andreas Weiermann]

Dear colleagues,

this is not intended as a spam email.

Presumably some of you might have gotten a copy of the following email.

---------

Dear Dr. Weiermann,

On behalf of the Guest Editors Prof. ..., I'm writing to invite you to 
submit a paper to the Special Issue entitled "Logic and Computation". It 
is running under the journal Mathematics (ISSN 2227-7390, IF 1.747, Rank 
Q1).

This Special Issue dedicated to logic and computation invites 
submissions of papers that address any aspect of the rather complex and 
broad relationship between the two areas. Please find details in the 
following link:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/mathematics/special_issues/Log_Comput

The submission deadline is 31 January 2022. You may send your manuscript 
now or up until the deadline. Submitted papers should not be under 
consideration for publication elsewhere. We encourage authors to send a 
short abstract or tentative title to us or the Editorial Office in 
advance (syna.mu at mdpi.com).

We are looking forward to hearing from you.
-- 
Kind regards,

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There exist people who consider MDPI as problematic or even predatory as 
can be seen from


https://academic.oup.com/rev/article/30/3/405/6348133?fbclid=IwAR1elkj95pOr3CDk2Yi3UxdThArJn_FIv8h0I6PcXUFmHIPQ46gatkG0Zl4 



https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publisher/?fbclid=IwAR1lt6F4RhbGLV3OWKH9Uvul1k0ZANIzad88CS9jzrakiplv6XWWb2_88pw 


As you can read above MDPI runs a math journal "Mathematics" with a high 
impact factor.

For a publication there the author has to pay a serious amount of money.


After visiting the journal's site I have doubts whether the impact 
factor is correlated with

scientific quality.

The sheer number of editors appears to be strange.

In that journal I also saw some papers which were of questionable quality.

I even learned (from one referee) that "Mathematics" published once a 
paper (without any

modification) which has been rejected by that referee.



There is also the MDPI journal "Axioms" (which claims to publish also 
logic papers)

about which I am not very enthousiastic

To my surprise Shelah has a publication there.

(Shelah's paper itself is fine of course.)


The wikipedia page of MDPI also contains a discussion on controversial 
points.


I decided for myself to stay away from this publisher.

Let me conclude with the remark

that I am not claiming that MDPI is the only publisher about which one 
could rise questions.



Best,

Andreas