As @ZednotZee seems intent on further publicising and defending an already discredited article, I will repost the link I posted on Zed’s other thread, summarising the general reputation of the organisation which saw fit to publish it in the first place.
www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/beware-academics-getting-reeled-scam-journals/
“ The publisher, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), churns out nearly 160 scholarly journals a year, many of them of mediocre quality, according to Jeffrey Beall, an associate professor and librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, and one of the world’s leading experts on what he calls “predatory” open access publishing. Each week, MDPI and other questionable publishers hound Dr. Lee by email, asking her to review submissions that she considers shoddy. Mr. Beall has called this particular environmental publication a “pretend journal.” So when Dr. Lee next saw the biology student, she alerted her to the potential problems and redirected her to more credible scholarly publications, such as FACETS, a Canadian open access journal.
Predatory and mediocre journals are based on the model of open access publishing in which authors pay fees to have their work published online. However, unlike legitimate journals, they bombard academics with spam emails, accept almost all submissions and overstate the rigour of their peer-review processes. They also often conveniently neglect to mention publication fees until late in the process.
In other cases, authors are complicit in the scam, publishing numerous articles in these questionable journals to earn quick and easy academic credit at their institutions. “There are some predatory journals that specialize in that, charging only $200 or $300 for publication,” says Mr. Beall. This compares to fees of $1,500 or more for most of the large, reputable open access publishers. “If you need academic credit, the market provides a solution,” he says, adding: “Universities are particularly susceptible to these ethical breaches and predatory practices.”