We are fortunate to have a publication fund at UiB that covers article processing charges for fully open access journals. Unfortunately, some individuals have exploited this to mass produce weak articles published in open access journals with poor peer review.
In Forskerforum, one can read about a PhD candidate who exploited the publication fund at the University of Agder cover 25 of the 78 articles he produced during his three years there. Eight of these were published by the sloppy Hindawi publisher and were later retracted when Wiley acquired Hindawi. Nine of the articles were published in in special issues under the MDPI publisherwhich has many low quality special issues.
Unfortunately, at K2 we have also hosted a researcher who grossly exploited this system and requested support for publishing 27 articles in MDPI and Frontiers between January and May 2025. Fortunately, the University Library has now tightened its practices for the UiB publication fund. Any serious and contentious researcher must be very careful to avoid supporting such special-issues or publishing in this manner.