What does MDPI stand for? 

MDPI

MDPI or Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute is a publisher of open access scientific journals. Founded by Shu-Kun Lin as a chemical sample archive, it has established over 200 broad-scope journals. MDPI is the largest open access publisher in the world and the 5th largest publisher overall in terms of journal paper output. The number of published papers has been growing significantly in the last decade with year over year growth of over 50% in 2017, 2018 and 2019.As of October 2021, MDPI publishes 369 academic journals, including 83 with an impact factor out of 91 covered by the Science Citation Index Expanded. Seven journals are indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index. MDPI journals are currently included in the Directory of Open Access Journals. MDPI is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, a participating publisher and supporter of the Initiative for Open Citations, and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).MDPI's business practices have resulted in significant growth but have attracted criticism, with controversies related to the quality of its peer reviews and accusations of subordination of academic functions to business interests. The publisher'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. MDPI was included on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing companies in 2014 but was removed in 2015 following a successful appeal and applying pressure to Beall's employer. In 2021 five MDPI journals were among the initial 13 journals included in the Norwegian Scientific Index as possibly predatory journals, known as level X; the publisher of the list, the National Publication Committee of Norway, linked its creation specifically to the expressions of concern regarding MDPI. Since 2017, MDPI has a book publisher-level rating of "level 1" in the Norwegian Scientific Index, the standard rating designating a publisher as academic.MDPI's average article processing charge has grown significantly over the years: most journals started with an APC 0-100 $/article, but currently the charges are 1000 CHF (~ 1000 US$) for most journals, and even higher (2000 CHF) for medical journals The charges levied by journals that had both IF and CiteScore were significantly higher than those charged by journals with neither IF nor CiteScore (p <0.05). The charges were also correlated to the age of the journal: the more recently launched journals charged less than the older journals did.

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