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MDPI is gamed by design, I think that while Elsevier is awful, MDPI is even worse with 100s of special issues where you are guaranteed to land publication in journals with quite nice IF (which is inflated by publishing large proportion of reviews and less original research).

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I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life.

"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.

They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.

Both metrics are supposedly binary but in reality have always depended heavily on surrounding context. Archival journals have existed all along. Publication is useful as an immutable entry in the public record made via a third party. Blog posts have a tendency to disappear over time.

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