I recently stumbled upon Predatory Reports, an anonymously-run website that lists journals and publishers with dubious practices and standards. This is a growing problem with the rise of open access publishing mandates; since authors only pay if their article is published, there is an incentive to lower standards and publish everything.
It is interesting to note the inclusion of MDPI and Frontiers Media in the Predatory Reports list. All of the justifying examples are, to the best of my knowledge, taken from life sciences journals, and it is not clear whether similar issues affect their physics journals. Personally, however, I have received occasional review requests from them for papers which I clearly have no expertise in reviewing.
A bigger issue (particularly with MDPI) is their spamming of special issue invitations. Since the guest editors will nominally handle submissions, including selecting potential referees, this can lead large variations in quality and standards among the articles published in a particular journal. Paolo Crosetto has a blog post analysing of the business model of special issue publishing and how it has turned into a money-printing machine for MDPI.
In related news, Nature published a feature on the journal eLife's decision last year to switch to a "publish everything" model, in which all papers which are sent to peer review are published alongside the referee reports. Nature is itself experimenting with similar open review ideas and the potential for the role of journals to shift from selective publishing to obtaining credible peer review reports. This model is particularly attractive for for-profit publishers, since it offers an attractive and reliable new source of revenue - under the open access model a journal loses money on every paper it rejects.
What will probably limit uptake of the publish everything model is that authors are ultimately after visibility of their work. Visibility requires selectivity, and you cannot have selectivity without rejecting a lot of papers.
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