Thanks, I hadn’t caught that!

Beall also claimed that MDPI used email spam to solicit manuscripts

I can confirm - this is what I’ve been experiencing after publishing with them once.

In August 2018, 10 senior editors (including the editor-in-chief) of the journal Nutrients resigned, alleging that MDPI forced the replacement of the editor-in-chief because of his high editorial standards and for resisting pressure to “accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance.”

Yep, this is really bad, and something I definitely should have known.

(Edit: In my defence, I was relatively inexperienced at the time, and was recommended to publish in a special issue there by a (very) senior researcher that I know well and have every reason to trust. They definitely should have known better, and I’ve since learned to not trust the judgement of your seniors, even when it seems reasonable at first sight to do so.)

MDPI even asked Jeffrey Beall, the author of Beall’s list of predatory publishers, to edit a Special Issue in a field that is not his own.

Yea, I’m never publishing with these guys again. I probably wouldn’t have anyway, because the email-spam has been so annoying, but now I definitely won’t.

For anyone interested in predatory publishing practices, the link is a pretty good and in-depth read.