https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/

Not by the look of it.

Look at its editorial board, impact factor, past papers and peer review processes.

Moreover - it is indexed by Scopus, SSCI (Web of Science) and many other databases and see journal ranking Q2 (Environmental Studies); Q1 (Geography, Planning and Development).

Dear Peter Brett

I have already checked all of these sources. However I cannot determine that this journal is a predatory one or not. Could you please check and let me know what your opinion is?

From chevking Scopus it looks to be a good journal. Note that it is Open Acess which typically means pay to publish. This may be why you think it is prefatory.

Thanks dear Michelle.

That is also my question.

Dear Maysam Abassi, same discussion is going around. I suggest you go through the following link: https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-to-deal-with-Potentially-Predatory-Open-Access-Journals-and-Publishers-the-case-of-MDPIs-Sustainability-journal

I checked on the database. Sustainability is not a predatory journal.

However, publication fee is too much since it is Open Access journal.

While Sustainability is not a predatory journal, there is actually a thread on MDPI journals, which might be interesting to whoever is interested:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_we_should_not_publish_in_MDPI_special_issues?isAnswerFieldFocused=true#view=605b391c6a9a6c71837e4f88

Check:

https://beallslist.net/#update

https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/?fbclid=IwAR3bazvqNSvJcYMHIbaQIW_H9lSkK_KhYHqG70xLKvCP4tAQk9ufILSbShI#J

Sustainability of predatory journal is an important issue , one should consider while publishing the paper in the predatory journal..

Any journals accelerate the publishing process through ignoring many academic ethics should be considered as a predatory journal . Macau University of Science and Technology do not accept articles published in Sustainability for promotion. Too many papers have been submitted to the paid journals since many academicians need articles to protect their full time and gain promotion.

Clearly "Sustainability" is predatory. When sent a request to review they wanted it in 10 days and included the authors' names with the abstract. They had no response to my strongly worded refusal to review on these terms, except a cancellation email the following day to say they now had enough reviews and mine was not needed. Such short turn around for reviews are impossible if true quality is sought - not to mention the lack of blind review. Please avoid submitting to and reviewing for this journal.

MDPI is a predatory publisher, even though some of its journals are categorized in SSCI and SCIE. Reasons are that some of these journals usually publish papers in different scopes and the turnaround peer review is sometimes around 5 weeks. I think it is better for authors to keep their money for such spam journals and also protect their fame from placing their names in such scanty publisher.

According to the 2019 Journal Citation Reports, the journal's impact factor is 2.576 (2019) and the 5-Year Impact Factor is 2.798. According to JCR category rank, Sustainability now ranks 120/265 (Q2) in 'Environmental Sciences' (SCIE) and 26/41 (Q3) in 'Green & Sustainable Science & Technology'.

It published articles which do not relate to sustainablity.

I reviewed 2 papers on gender. The word sustainability was not mentioned in the article, nor were there any refs, nor was the CFP on sustainability. It used to be good but going down if they accept papers with no ref to sustainablity

Gender equality and women's empowerment are fundamental human rights that are required to achieve global sustainable development goals.

I wondering if you could clarify the nature of the paper that you have reviewed.

Olatunji

The papers were on gender in sport and work life balance. Great papers but not for Sustainability. The papers never addressed sustainability, and as I said the word sustainability was never once cited. But they were published in sustainability??

Apparently, the answer is yes if tie your question to the publishing behavior. High APC with high publishing turnover may refer to that side. Moreover, the journal focus is wide and author friendly more than it should be. Perhaps, it is because of COVID financial stress.

MDPI based in Switzerland are doing amazing in growth and profits

Apparently, SUSTAINABILITY as an mdpi journal fulfils all the parameters for it it is indexed by Scopus, SSCI (Web of Science) and many other highly reputable databases and journals. I enjoy reading articles published by the mdpi group.

There is a very informative article published in the December 11, 2019 issue of the journal, Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03759-y). This article provides direction on identifying predatory journals.

The article also draws from a Delphi study to offer the following definition: Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.

This article and many of the comments here raise questions about the integrity of Sustainability.

Interesting news

Sustainability is now not ranked in business. This is huge change. The ranking great for Geography and Environment with q1. For Sustainability now ranks 124/274 (Q2) in the “Environmental Sciences (SCIE)” category, 60/125 (Q2) in the “Environmental Studies (SSCI)” category, 6/9 (Q3) in the “Green & Sustainable Science & Technology (SSCI)” category and 30/44 (Q3) in the “Green & Sustainable Science & Technology (SCIE)” category. It has also received an increased CiteScore. Sustainability now ranks 110/704 (Q1) in the “Geography, Planning and Development” category and 18/104 (Q1) in the “Environmental Science (miscellaneous)” category.

Sustainability is not a predatory journal. However, publication fee is too much since it is Open Access journal. Sustainability of predatory journal is an important issue , one should consider while publishing the paper in the predatory journal..

https://www.researchgate.net › post

Is "Sustainability" a predatory journal or not? - ResearchGate

Sustainability Science Rank and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) The overall rank of Sustainability Science is 1892. According to SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), this journal is ranked 1.659. SCImago Journal Rank is an indicator, which measures the scientific influence of journals.Nov 16, 2021

https://www.resurchify.com › details

Sustainability Science- Impact Score, Overall Ranking, h-index, ...

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is-the-journal-Sustainability-and-its-publisher-MDPI-predatory-or-reputable,kindly check this link.

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability,kindly check this link.

https://ideas4sustainability.wordpress.com/2020/10/30/why-not-to-publish-in-sustainability-and-youre-welcome-to-share-this-post/amp/,this link may be useful.

It is not a predatory journal

It has SSCI web of science accreditation

But as Researcher in UK it's ranking is declining in business.

It is valued in Environmental Sciences systems and a range of management journals Global Environment Change, but not the spectrum of business and Mgmt as before.

It is not a predatory journal

It has SSCI web of science accreditation

But as Researcher in UK it's ranking is declining in business.

It is valued in Environmental Sciences in the sub section in Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law which cover a

a range of management journals:

Global Environment Change, but not the spectrum of business and Mgmt as before. This also includes

Business Strategy and Environment

International journal of project Mgmt

CSR and Env Management

I think this is due to more stricter views of what are Mgmt journals.

The message is that you can submit to sustainablity, and get published by sustainability, even if the article does not have sustainability word in the manuscript.

Research leaders and directors pick up on this. Why would someone submit a paper on gender and sport management to sustainablity?

In UK this is now questioned. A great shame as it's a good journal. But it does need to publish articles on sustainability

I think "Sustainability" is not a predatory journal under MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) publisher

"Sustainability" is not a predatory journal.

Fareed thankyou for your insights. Reading the blogs and commentary perhaps it's time to review predatory.

The journal is valued by some disciplines, but it's pushing of special issues to everyone and everything undermines core aims of journal, and it's sections have now gone OTT. The SI summary below mentions nothing of sustainability. The papers I reviewed for this SI were rejected on the basis that the papers had no sustainability words. Think about this. Literally, the word sustainability was never used. This also applied to references. No sustainability references, only gender and sport.

It gets better

"Gender Issues in Sport and Leisure Activities"

As you probably know well, the sport domain retains a considerable degree of disparity between males and females. This is true for both the sport organizations and the sport performance as well as for many of the activities that people carry on in their free time. Sport is considered mainly a masculine domain for its intrinsic characteristics (i.e., strength) and women who engage in some specific kind of sports may be perceived as “masculine”. The persistence of these stereotypes, reinforced by the mass-media representation of female athletes (e.g., masculine, sexualized), put other barriers for gender equality inside the sport field. Gender inequality is at the origin of under-performance of female athletes and barrier to job career for women working in sport organizations. Respecting gender difference in sport activities and sport organizations helps maintaining an inclusive environment. On the contrary, a lack of respect brings to social and psychological cost both for women and men. This special issue is devoted to investigating the questions raised by gender inequalities in the diverse areas of sport and leisure practice. In this way we may all together make stock of the current situation and contribute to raise the awareness of these phenomena. Your contribution will certainly improve the quality and the impact of this special issue of Sustainability.

Did you see this? The SI CFP never refers to sustainablity themes. Never mentions sustainability in the references either.

What is going on?

Sustainability jas got WofS impact factor, and seriously many know Scopus not used by many unis.

Clearly the journal is accepting articles outside the ethos and aims of sustainability field.

I expected better of MDPi

Please get it back on track as losing integrity

I forgot to add. I was the only reviewer that rejected the paper. 4 other accepted, 3 from China

So what is going on 😊

Check whether it is available on reputed platforms. Maybe Scopus, Elsevier, science direct, ABDC list, etc. Also, check Scimago's ranking.

Sustainability was just dropped from the Nordic Kanal Register (Norwegian scientific body). They deemed it non-academic. See:

https://khrono.no/stryker-et-av-verdens-storste-fra-listen-over-godkjente-tidsskrifter/689264

It also was central to a Russian Paper Mill operation, where editors at Sustainability were selling author slots for up to $5000, coordinated alongside a few other MDPI journals. See:

Preprint Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers o...

It has never had a good reputation, and its level of self-citation is at >15% (drastically and artificially inflating its Impact Factor: https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=21100240100&tip=sid&clean=0)

If you care about names, yes even the Nordic Kanal Register think it's a 'predatory journal.' But you should steer clear because it's a junk-science journal (emphasized by an absolutely pitiful SciMago journal rank) that artificially inflates its impact factor by pumping out 'special issues' that are anything but special. See: https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publisher/

Certainly not a predatory journal!

I totally agree with Mark. I believe that soon the scientific community will re-evaluate the credibility of this journal. Many universities in Macau such as MUST do not accept articles in this journal for performance evaluation. Charging $5000 for one article and artificially accelerating the review process with zero rejection rate is enough evidence for being a paid journal - a predatory journal.

Sustainability is not a predatory Journal rather it is one of the good academic journals.

The Norwegian national publication committee has recently decided that Sustainability will be rated "Level 0", which means that the journal does not satisfy the minimum requirements to be counted as scientific. Sustainability will be removed as an approved journal from the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers.

Thank you very much for this discussion. I have been wondering the same thing regarding MDPI in general and their journal "Energies" in particular. Done several reviews for them (including for Sustainability), most of them very critical (to reflect the quality of the manuscripts), but my experience is mixed - the journal rejected several very bad papers, but many bad papers got published. I do have a similar experience with other journals from "more established" journals, so I do not know what to think. And I am not sure if it is a good idea to publish with them.

You can always check with Beall's list of predatory journals. Here is the link - https://beallslist.net/

The Balls list took mdpi journals off the list.

This good man trying to do genuine good work and he lost his job

I just received the following invitation from this journal:

"Dear Dr. Fenton-O'Creevy,

We read your recent paper, paper title, with great interest. Our Editorial Board believes that your work would fit perfectly in Sustainability (SSCI&SCIE indexing), so we would like to offer you the opportunity to publish a paper to the Section "Sustainable Management" of Sustainability for free.

At Sustainability, we are passionate about the fast distribution of quality science. Sustainability is fully open access, meaning that all articles are immediately and freely available online to read, download, and share once published. Our open access model also allows authors to retain their copyright through a Creative Commons license. All manuscripts in Sustainability undergo a rigorous peer review and professional English editing and formatting if accepted.

On average, a first decision is provided to authors 16.7 days after submission, and papers are accepted for publication in 3.5 days (according to the median values of the papers published in Sustainability in the first half of 2022). An article processing charge (APC) of CHF 2000 typically applies to each accepted paper; however, this invitation entitles you to publish a manuscript in Sustainability free of charge."

Others should judge for themselves but it seems to bear many of the hallmarks of a dodgy journal. It seems like they are trying to boost reputation by free publication invitations to established researchers. However the claimed turnaround times offer little confidence in the quality of the review process.

I was considering sending a paper to the Journal for possible publication before pausing to confirm and getting all these insights. At a point, I was skeptical about the quality of the Journal based on the high frequency of it's publications in a year. With two publications every month and 24 in a year, the quality of the Journal is obviously doubtful.

To my knowledge, a predatory journal is a publication that claims to be a legitimate scholarly journal but misrepresents its publishing practices. From my own experience submitting to Sustainability journal, it was far from predatory practice. Although the APC is relatively high, but I can assure the quality of its services, such as (1) designated PiC as liaison officer communicating with me, and this person is so responsive in email (2) sophisticated portal/dashboard systems for submission and tracking, (3) intensive review, (4) initially 2 of the reviewers did not come into conclusion for my paper, and they assign the 3rd reviewers who support major revision (5) Feedback for major revision details, including which line number should be revised, changed, etc, asking for more supporting information, (6) due date and reminder for submitting a revision. I tend to agree that MDPI is such an efficient organization and knows how to provide good publication services, rather than a "predatory" publisher who just wanted the money from the researcher.

One easily distinguishable sign of predatory publishing is the large amount of articles published over o short period of time for profit. It looks like a predatory journal to me. And just a part of a huge predatory publishing company. Not to imply that the more reputable journals do not engage in predatory practices, in fact they contributed greatly to the formation of the dominant ultra-capitalist science impact evaluation scam... but still. `Sustainability` is an `impact factor` factory. It creates its prestige appearance by co-opting researchers in large numbers, and they, in turn, divert the public funding streams through MDPI.

Mass publishing is not something bad in itself. It is definitely bad when it diverts large amounts of money from developing countries to a cloud of papers that have little to say to those countries or to the world. And even if some of them are brilliant and socially relevant, how can anyone hope to find them in that endless pit? That money could have been spent in a much more productive and socially useful manner.

Those who published there will disagree, of course, and they are many, but there is a reason for which the voice of the minority should be always listened to... judge for yourself : Sustainability, Volume 14, Issue 17 (September-1 2022) – 656 articles

I just want to add an observation I made - totally subjective of course: I have never seen anyone defending this journal who has not published in it. Anyone who is not satisfied with such anecdotal evidence, can just read what the Norwegian national publication committee has to say about Sustainability...

Sustainability has more than 3300 open calls for special issues: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues?page_no=67

This is what I find very questionable about all of the MDPI journals