The sudden death of a 27-year-old woman in the Romania offices of MDPI, a major open-access publisher with a worldwide presence, has grabbed national headlines and raised questions about the conditions under which the firm’s employees work.
Local news reports said the woman had initially fainted in MDPI’s Bucharest office on Friday, October 4, but that her superiors refused to call an ambulance or let her go home after she revived. She later collapsed again and died from a heart attack after efforts to resuscitate her failed, according to the reports.
A business consultant in Romania also wrote about the case in a blog post, quoting emails from anonymous MDPI employees describing a “toxic” work environment and “constant pressures” to perform.
But in an interview with Retraction Watch, a colleague of the deceased woman, identified as Maria Alexandra Anghel, contested the media’s account of events.
According to the source, a member of MDPI’s editorial staff in Bucharest, only a few minutes passed between the first and second time Anghel fainted. To the source’s knowledge, no one had tried to prevent her from going home.
“The media reports, I think, are a bit exaggerated,” said the source, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation (their identity is known to us).
But the editorial worker called the blog post’s description of the many workplace problems “spot on.” They highlighted an extreme culture of performance focused on quantity rather than quality, frequent culture clashes with managers in China and micromanagement “on another level.” (A day after we contacted the firm for comment about the workplace conditions, MDPI adjusted its performance targets for employees.)
In a statement about Anghel’s death, MDPI offered condolences and said it was cooperating with authorities investigating the “circumstances surrounding this tragic incident.”
“Out of respect for Alexandra’s family and loved ones, we are not providing further details at this time,” the publisher said. ”We will share more information once the investigation is complete.“
MDPI CEO Stefan Tochev did not respond directly to the accusations in the media or the allegations our sources made. He told us in an email:
Many colleagues in our Romania offices have expressed that the media and blog speculation surrounding this situation has been deeply traumatizing. As a priority, we have focused on providing grief counseling and immediate support to our teams, offering time away and work-from-home options to help them during this difficult time. We continuously review our processes and operations, and employee safety remains a top priority for us.
Tochev added:
Linking this tragic event to working practices would be completely inappropriate without you having the facts or formal information. An independent investigation is ongoing, and our top priority remains supporting Alexandra’s family and our colleagues.
MDPI was founded in 1996 in Basel, Switzerland, by the Chinese chemist Shu-Kun Lin, who remains president of the company and chairman of its board. A fast-growing open-access publisher with speedy review timelines and a plethora of special issues, the firm has faced questions about the quality of its papers. Some of its journals have been downgraded in influential rating systems and reevaluated or removed from indexing services.
Performance metrics for editorial staffers prioritize the quantity of published manuscripts over their quality, our source in Bucharest said. Editors get one performance point for every published manuscript they handle, but only half of a point for rejecting a manuscript. Staffers who reach a certain number of points get a monthly bonus. Assistant editors, for instance, had a target of 15 points per month until Oct. 22, 2024, the day after we emailed MDPI the allegations in this story, when the number was lowered to 12, according to our source.
“It kind of incentivizes us to push towards publication instead of rejection,” the source said. “They say they want quality. They never want quality, they just want quantity.”
For editors who manage special issues, the target is to send out 40 to 50 email invitations to potential guest editors every week, the employee added. “The way they operate the special issues is again quantity over quality.”
The source expressed concern for how the performance culture affects the scientific enterprise. “It’s not really scientific what we do,” they said. “It’s just money printing, pretty much.”
An employee at MDPI’s other Romania office, in the city of Cluj-Napoca, echoed this description.
“In this company we are treated as a number,” said the employee in an email translated from Romanian. “Either you perform and bring profits to the company, or it’s more convenient to leave.”
The source described having been asked to work during time off because the local group leader worried about losing money. “The group leaders do not receive their bonus during our days off,” the source told us. (We confirmed the source works at MDPI’s office in Cluj-Napoca, but they would not share details allowing full identification given the potential legal repercussions of violating the non-disclosure agreement MDPI makes employees sign. The information this source provided was consistent with what the Bucharest source told us.)
Tochev told us:
While some individuals may use this opportunity to voice frustration, something we understand and respect, it’s important to note that their views may not reflect the reality or opinion of the majority of our staff, management, or operational practices.
At MDPI, employees are encouraged to maintain both quality and efficiency in their work. Decisions on which papers are accepted for publication are made solely by independent Academic Editors, scholars in the field, and not by MDPI staff.
The Bucharest staffer acknowledged the decision to publish belonged to the academic editor, with support from reviewers, but said the in-house assistant editor at MDPI “is the one who chooses all of them.” The source added:
When inviting reviewers you see that some are more prone to reject than others. We always get told to avoid reviewers that have a lot of reject decisions in the past.
The two MDPI employees both described “constant” micromanagement from managers based in China. At the very beginning of the workday in Romania, or even before it starts, managers in China send messages on the Microsoft Teams platform with specific tasks, or checking on the status of manuscripts, the sources said.
If an employee doesn’t have time to do a task one day, the next day managers will ask why, the Bucharest staffer said.
Managers in China also compile reports of “mistakes” employees have made over the past few months, according to the source in Cluj-Napoca. Then, they summon the employee to a meeting “where you have to explain to them why you made those mistakes 6 months ago with some manuscripts that you don’t even remember.”
The reports are one of a number of tactics MDPI allegedly uses to target low-performing employees. According to our sources, the publisher last year launched a system to monitor performance and put staffers with an unsatisfactory output under observation unless they agree to resign “by mutual consent.”
“Most employees get intimidated and put into observation period just to force them to resign,” the Bucharest staffer told us in an email, adding that “this comes with a lot of ‘sabotage’ from the Chinese colleagues.” Examples of sabotage include delayed response times from colleagues in China, leading targeted employees to miss important deadlines, and being assigned subpar manuscripts that are likely to get rejected, yielding fewer performance points and thus creating a vicious circle, the sources explained.
Both said they believed Anghel was under observation by her managers when she died, or had been previously. “As far as I know, Alexandra was put under observation multiple times,” the Bucharest staffer told us.
The Cluj-Napoca employee also described surprise visits from Chinese colleagues who would work 10-hour days, getting up from their chairs only for lunch or meetings and using the bathroom only during lunch breaks. The unannounced visitors would “often hide when they’re on social media or texting relatives,” according to the source, and would take pictures of their Romanian colleagues chatting to each other or relaxing on beanbag chairs provided by the company.
“I believe [MDPI’s] unethical practices and the publication of low-quality manuscripts for financial gain pose a significant threat to the academic community,” the Cluj-Napoca employee told us. “While I am certainly frustrated with their practices, my primary concern is the potential impact on academic progress. Additionally, the company has exhibited abusive and controlling behavior toward its employees, which needs to be addressed.”
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I am grateful for Retraction Watch’s report, and the content speaks for itself.
MDPI’s work culture, at its core, is about putting relentless pressure on frontline employees. A simple example is the requirement of ’40 to 50 email invitations to potential guest editors every week’—which is typically much higher for certain sections of the company. And it’s not as simple as pulling some scholars’ emails from MDPI’s database and sending out a generic invitation as it might appear. Employees have to go through several regulating steps, find less than 10 candidates through thousands, battle against multi-layered supervision, and then send out the invitations one by one, with nerves and uncertainty. What should be routine invitations instead become a traumatic, time-consuming daily task for every employee. If you don’t manage to secure 2 or 3 (or more) accepted guest editors in a given month, you can expect even more pressure.
These difficulties, of course, are caused by MDPI itself. The growing depletion of academia’s trust has made their invitation model harder and harder to sustain. And how do the managers and higher-ups—those who rose through the ranks during easier times—solve this? By putting more pressure and unrealistic demands on the employees.
Inviting guest editors is just one part of it. Now imagine having 5+ different time-consuming tasks to battle through EVERY DAY. Even if you’re efficient and talented enough to get through all of it within 8 hours, the pressure haunts you. It causes insomnia, waking up every weekend with emails haunting in your mind. You start doubting if this work truly contributes to academia or if the salary is even worth it.
There are many scholars who are genuinely kind and warm in their engagement with MDPI, although they may never know—they sometimes are the only warmth the employees ever experience in their work!
Of course, we cannot immediately conclude that MDPI is directly responsible for the death of the Romanian employee. However, I appreciate both Romanian media and Retraction Watch for bringing this issue to light. The unsustainability of MDPI’s model not only harms academia, but also puts significant pressure on young employees, placing them at risk during what should be the prime of their careers.
As a supplement to my comment:
– I use ’employee’ because the role and structure at MDPI are complex and involve many types of ‘editors’. However, I generally refer to the frontline editors, such as assistant editors and some managing editors.
– I also want to highlight that, while managers in China can indeed be abusive, most Chinese frontline employees are also victims of the system. Regardless of cultural differences or personal tolerance, the pursuit of meaningful work and respect for academia are universally shared values. It is the system that distorts these ideals.
A young woman died, I think the last thing her parents now care about are the “predatory” practices of MDPI. If investigation reveals that her death can be attributed to a bad work environment, then this blogpost would make sense (focussing more on the bad work place practices in Romania, and whether other MDPI offices follow a same awful protocol), but no investigation has been done, we know very little about the exact cause of her death, pre-existing medical conditions, how the staff handled her passing, and any of that. Even disgruntled MDPI employees attest to this.
You can write about the predatory practices of MDPI, including how they treat their employees, without using the tragic passing of this woman to serve this goal. Now, it looks like cheap reporting to me, not respecting the family of the young lady who passed away.
Which one do you think is more helpful to her family? (1) Quickly write up this report to back up the belief they probably hold: it is this toxic work environment who killed this lady. (2) Do careful investigation for months, then write up this report to back up the belief they probably hold from the beginning. Or (3) Do careful investigation for months, then find out that the lady’s death is more related to her pre-existing medical conditions and has little to do with the company.
If I were the family member of this young lady, I’d like to quickly identify a target of vengence or someone/thing I can vent on. I’d be relieved to know her death is acknowledged and the company is to blame. “Disrespect” wouldn’t be the first thing that comes to my mind when I see an article addressing her death and pointing out a culprit.
Please do a search with the name of this lady. Who else cares even a little bit about her death? I’d say it’s good enough for RW to reveal this tragedy so soon after it happened. The primary concern of RW is, as you said, revealing the predatory practices of MDPI, including how they treat their employees. The level of humanitarian concern you’re asking for is beyond the scope of RW’s work.