I received an email from Birds Editorial Office MDPI ([email protected]) with the subject line: Feature Paper Invitation for Ornithological Research, asking me to submit a new paper to their journal for a full waiver (100% discount), which I assume means I would not have to pay to publish the article. I get numerous emails all the time from journals I've never heard of, not in my field asking me to submit papers. This email is different because: 1. it is in my field; 2. they are offering me a chance to publish something for free; 3. the due date to submit is months away, rather than next week or something unrealistic; 4. I have published a paper with MDPI before in the Animals journal, so I am familiar with the publisher, at least.
I just wondered if any of you had received similar emails from mdpi and if you think I can trust this one or if I should treat it as spam like I do the others?
Thanks!
Dear Virginia Abernathy
No this is not spam. I think you can trust this one. First of all the mail address is trustworthy according to the website of this journal https://www.mdpi.com/journal/birds/editorial_office If they mention the full waiver remark themselves then you can count on a nice possibility to publish open access for free.
I had recently a similar experience with this publisher. I received an invitation to publish in the inaugural issue of one of their latest journal titles called “Lipidology”. When it comes to the costs it was in my case expressed as “the accepted paper from you after peer-review would be published *free of charge*”. Everything went ‘normal’ with proper peer review, professional editing etc. and resulted in a nice paper: Article Comparison of In Silico Signal Sequence-Phospholipid Results...
You might be aware that not everybody is that fond of this publisher, see for example https://www.researchgate.net/post/Should_articles_published_in_MDPI_journals_be_excluded_in_the_assessment_of_the_scientific_production_Is_this_already_happening_in_your_country
In some cases the concerns are justified (they published, like so many other publishers, “special issues” excessively) but in most cases I think that for example their proper indexing (Scopus, Clarivate’s indexing like ESCI and SCIE, PubMed etc.) is a comforting guarantee that they operate with sufficient scientific rigor. Furthermore, when looking at your list of publications I see a ‘healthy’ spread of different journals published by different publishers so no real issue here.
I think this is, as said, a nice opportunity to publish open access for free. Personally I would say go for it.
Best regards.
I also received tons of other editors requesting publication. I do not remember from that journal, but I would instead check with an email to the journal editor!
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