Recently, the collapse of Frontiers and MDPI in the science community is well-known.

At the end of June, JUFO announced to downgrade 60 kinds of journals, covering 21 journals of MDPI, 3 journals of  Wiley ,and 3 journals of Frontiers. At the beginning of 2025, these journals will be downgraded from level 1 to level 0.

Previously, JUFO downgraded MDPI’s Sustainability journal to level 0 in 2023, due to the suspicion on the procedures of journals to ensure scientific quality. Although the possibility of downgrading all journals of MDPI has been discussed at JUFO meeting in June, no action was ultimately taken. 

Researchers who have long been following MDPI, Hindawi, and Frontiers, the three major OA publishers, must know that disturbances arose repeatedly before the "downgrading" event.

l The Ministry of Education of Malaysian universities issued a statement o Sept. 2, 2023---prohibiting public universities in the country from using national budget funds to pay for publishing papers in all journals under MDPI, Hindawi, and Frontiers academic publishers.

l Predatory Reports website dedicated to exposing predatory journals included all 199 journals under Frontiers in the list of predatory journals, consisting of 51 SCIE journals and 4 SSCI journals on March 29, 2023.

l Predatory Reports website dedicated to exposing predatory journals releases news that 422 journals of MDPI were listed as predatory journals, including  98 SCIE/SSCI journals on February 23, 2023.  

It is undeniable that the reputation of Frontiers and MDPI has indeed declined greatly in the past two years, and their journals were laughingly called “problematic journals” owing to relatively low levels of publication threshold. Some netizens even recognize “publication on Frontiers and MDPI” as “a life stain”.

Divergent public opinions online

In recent days, there has been a discussion online about whether publication on Frontiers and MDPI is a life stain, which has attracted much attention.

“It’s a stain, but it's better than nothing at all...”

“It’s better than the worst. I even have no 5 representative publications. Heart broken for being my academic stain…” 

Is it really a stain on life?

Different people have different views.

Despite the poor reputation of Frontiers and MDPI, the two publishers have truly benefited many people in terms of award selection, PhD application, etc.

Which group of people can continue to submit?

In fact, most people can submit at present. If you do not have a noble academic pursuit but only hope to acquire some achievements rapidly to realize your goals, these two publishers can contribute to achieving your goal.

Which group of people is not recommended to continue submit?

People, who have long been devoted to scientific research and will continue to be committed to scientific business and aim to conduct many research projects, should think carefully for submission. Although many academicians have successful acceptance experience when submitting to these two publishers, careful consideration should be given when submitting with the aims to improve successful publication rates.

In most cases, an unavoidable fact lies in it’s not that we don’t want to submit to good journals, but due to financial constraints that result in insufficient data volumein  some papers, or a lack of creativity in continuous work.

We cannot criticize our peers who publish on Frontiers and MDPI just because we can publish on CNS. After all, everyone has different academic background and conditions, and each research group has various funding and research foundation. We should respect and understand these varieties and jointly promote the progress of academic research.