The rise of LIDSEN Publishing Inc. - how serious is that publisher?

Question

LIDSEN Publishing Inc. is a relatively new publisher that came to my attention a while ago. Their practices (e.g. sending multiple emails per day asking for submissions / special issues / reviews) is somewhat comparable to MDPI in my opinion. However, glancing at their review times, most article have a much slower turn-around and "more reasonable review times". That said, their editorial board in a journal in my field really contains some big shots (well known Professors and researchers) although the journal is barely indexed outside of GoogleScholar. Does LIDSEN Publishing Inc employ a comparable aggressive marketing system like MDPI? Where could I get more neutral/objective information about this publisher?

Please note that this is not intended to be another discussion about MDPI. Numerous threads exist on this topic already.

Answer 1

I think the most neutral and objective information you will get will come from skimming papers in journals you're interested in. They can lie about all sorts of metrics and editorial policies, but they really can't hide bad papers. I don't know what other object data you will find - I suppose you could cross-reference their papers with PubPeer and see if you get any hits.

They seem like they are trying to break into the MDPI dominated grey-market (like so many other not-quite-obviously-predatory but not-quite-trustworthy publishers). So their practices are probably similar under the hood.

My personal opinion is that LISDEN is suspicious. Their websites feel off for a lot of reasons.Their indexing is lacking, they seem to churn out special issues, their APC is suspiciously low, and it seems like they may be a rebranding of a Open Biomedical Publishing - a now defunct (I think) publisher. I'm not convinced by longer review times either. It doesn't take a genius to realize that it looks bad to accept papers in a matter of days and, honestly, they may not have the infrastructure to churn through papers that quickly anyway.