MDPI AG Reviews

Frankly, I do not even know where to begin, my cheerful outlook on life was really destroyed when I joined this company. When I say that, "you do not matter" I really mean it. You will not be important to this company, you will be treated without any respect and manners. Sitting alone in silence in the freezing cold office, having your every move monitored was horrible. I couldn't even go to the bathroom without being judged. You dont have any friends because its looked down up if you hang out in a group. As an extrovert, I seriously felt lonely and bored and the only interaction were from "tutors" that constantly laugh at you, judge you from China. Their attitude towards you is completely demoralizing and assign you unnecessarily amount of work just when it time to go home, and yes you are micromanaged to the toe. Your job is to bother senior researchers, doctors, professors, surgeons and rush them as if I was their boss, its embarrassing. Knowing that, what I was doing was completely unreasonable, I dialed it down just to get in trouble by my "tutors" in China. I have been through under the bus by my own tutors and publicly shamed in international group chats about my performance....I have never been so embarrassed to be associated with MDPI.

1. Very shady company. More than 10 offices in china yet only those in major cities are reported on website. 2. Staff from China offices will be promoted to high positions even though they know near to nothing about academic publishing and have not published a paper before. Westerners will be promoted to lower ranking positions that primarily serve a public relation role with the intention to deceive others that this is a western/european company. 3. Staff in china offices will resort to underhanded means to achieve KPIs. An example would be asking authors to withdraw and resubmit their manuscripts under revision with the intention to lower Mean Publication Time (MPT). This can easily be correlated and verified with other feedback here from colleagues in east european countries. 3. Company internal chats is operated using skype. However, mandarin is the main communication language despite the presence of other european and english speaking colleagues. Local office director even encouraged me to speak mandarin during my probation interview. 4. Pay increment with promotion is in the form of conditional tagged bonus and is rather pathetic. This means that your bonus or pay increment is gone for a certain month the moment you clear leave and fail to meet your KPI for the month. 5. Leave cannot be brought forward. Medical insurance is at a minimum. Spouses and family members are not covered. 13th month bonus is disguised as performance bonus. Hardly competitive. 6. Higher-ups will walk around (ie to the pantry) and eavesdrop on local colleagues. Any badspeak regarding the company will be referred to the director and colleague will get cold treatment. Daily attendance have to be recorded. 7. Biggest joke. Training is given by colleagues who have no experience in the field. Imagine training on publishing ethics given by a newly minted colleague with no proper education in the field. Employees are required to spend personal time out of work to read up and then clear test and courses to obtain internal certification, which is not recognized outside of the company. But which is required for internal promotion. Very High turnover rate. None of my colleagues lasted more than 1 year. The horrible turnover rate (>90%) is a testament to the horrible management and environment in this company. The only reason why I am writing this is so that anybody who read this will seriously reconsider their decision to enter this company and waste their precious time.