MDPI

MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is a publisher of open-access scientific journals. It publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open-access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and was the largest publisher of open access articles in 2020. It was founded by Shu-Kun Lin as a chemical sample archive. Between 2016 and 2020, the number of peer-reviewed papers published by MDPI grew significantly, with year-over-year growth of over 50% in 2017, 2018 and 2019, attracting attention to their very fast article processing times. In a review of 26 open-access "mega-journals" that published over 3,500 papers in 2022, 11 (42%) of the journals were from MDPI. Besides launching its own journals, MDPI has acquired journals from other publishers, such as Tomography from Grapho Publications in 2021, and Nursing Reports and Audiology Research from PagePress Publications in 2020. As of January 2024, MDPI publishes 433 academic journals, including 92 journals indexed within the Science Citation Index Expanded, 7 journals indexed within the Social Sciences Citation Index, 138 journals listed in SciFinder, and 270 in Scopus. Its journals are included in the DOAJ. MDPI also publishes open access books indexed in DOAB, OAPEN and BCI. It is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), and a participating publisher and supporter of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). MDPI's business model is based on establishing entirely open access broad-discipline journals, with fast processing times from submission to publication and article processing charges paid by the author, their institutions or funders. MDPI's business practices have attracted controversy, with critics suggesting it sacrifices editorial and academic rigor in favor of operational speed and business interests. MDPI was included on Jeffrey...