Death and Taxes and OA
An MDPI employee dies in Romania, and a public access proposal downplays and hides costs to taxpayers
Publish and Perish at MDPI?
In a grim story out of MDPI Romania, a 27-year-old employee reportedly died of a heart attack at work after suffering fainting spells but being told she couldn’t leave to seek treatment. The event seems to have revealed a spate of problems in the offices, where employees “claim that the environment is toxic, characterized by unrealistic expectations and a lack of support from management.”
A letter published as part of the story on PredatoryJournals.org goes into much more detail, and while it is n=1, the letter seems level-headed, and would make me worry.
The author of the letter writes about how the Chinese owners of MDPI micromanage, badger, ignore mental health concerns, and play hardball — all underpinned by one particularly salient point in the letter:
Quantity over quality. This is an extremely serious aspect, because the Chinese management wants to publish as many scientific articles as possible without thinking too much about their quality or the impact of false or erroneous research on society.
The tragic death of an employee at work — under circumstances that appear at this point to have been preventable, had the employee received appropriate medical treatment when she first fainted — may have uncovered a toxic workplace at MDPI Romania. If what the letter-writer says is true, it is an editorial sweatshop, driven by a hard-driving, profit-seeking OA publisher focused on quantity over quality.
Given that Frontiers laid off 1/3 of its workforce earlier this year without a concomitant reduction in output, and a number of other operators emphasizing quantity over quality, one wonders how many OA sweatshops exist in the world — and how much of a human toll quantity-based profit-seeking publishing is taking, both inside and outside publishing houses.
An OA Fantasy Down Under
Yet, some people continue to idealize OA.