Finland downgraded all 193 MDPI journals to level 0, equating them with non-peer-reviewed publications, after special issue volume exploded to 40,000 per year

In December 2024, Finland's Publication Forum (JUFO) downgraded all 193 MDPI journals to its lowest level 0 rating -- the same category as popular press articles and publications without peer review. This means Finnish researchers who publish in any MDPI journal receive zero points toward funding applications and career evaluations. The Chinese Academy of Sciences followed suit in its 2025 revision, removing all MDPI journals from its recommended list. The trigger was MDPI's industrial-scale use of special issues: the publisher went from 388 special issues in 2013 to nearly 40,000 in 2021, averaging 500 special issues per journal. In 2023, the Journal of Molecular Sciences alone had 4,216 open special issues -- 11.5 closing every single day. The immediate victims are the tens of thousands of researchers who published in MDPI journals in good faith. A Finnish postdoc who published three papers in an MDPI journal in 2023, believing it was a legitimate indexed venue, now finds those publications are worth zero in funding evaluations. Their competitors who published in non-MDPI journals of similar quality have an insurmountable advantage. Researchers in fields where MDPI journals were dominant venues (sustainability science, environmental engineering, materials science) face a retroactive devaluation of years of published work. The papers are not retracted -- they still exist -- but they carry the institutional stigma of a publisher that an entire country's funding system has declared untrustworthy. The structural problem is that the open-access APC model creates a direct financial incentive to maximize the number of published papers, and special issues are the most efficient mechanism to do so. Each special issue generates a call for papers that produces submissions, each submission generates APC revenue upon acceptance, and guest editors are incentivized to accept rather than reject because their CV benefits from a successfully completed special issue. MDPI's model is the logical endpoint of a system where the publisher is paid per paper published rather than per paper rejected. Quality control is a cost that reduces revenue. The market rewards volume, and MDPI optimized for volume more aggressively than any competitor.