I just read a paper published last month in the "Energies" journal of MDPI.

MDPi are Swiss registered publishers of open access, peer reviewed, scientific papers in a variety of fields; they were founded and still run by a PRC national. The editor in chief of "Energies", one of the many journals that MDPI publish, is an Italian professor in Rome. MDPI have a very mixed reputation, including their peer review process, although on the whole have been rated as being academic by the Norwegian Scientific Index, that is, NSI have rated a minority of the journals / published papers as crap.

The paper in question was published by a consortium of authors stated to be affiliated with 3 universities in Russia. The data presented in the paper is of interest to me, but I also found a few red flags in the paper.

One illustration purportedly shows the hardware for one type of process but is clearly for another process.

One producer that is a data source is mentioned at least twice for being engaged in a manufacturing process that is different from what they use. (I know this first hand.) Furthermore, the paper refers to the producer by their original name which was replaced at least 10 years ago.

Another producer that is another data source is mentioned as using a completely different process.

There are reasons to suspect that there are national interests at play, but I won't get into it because it would just be speculation.

As mentioned, the data is of commercial interest to me, that is, I would be interested in including it in our external communication particularly because they tell a completely different story compared to the loosely substantiated claims made in a previous paper that was sponsored by large corporates in one specific sub-sector.

Both my head and gut tell me to ignore the paper.

Based on the generalities above, what would you think?