Open Access Information

(If you are new to the concept of Open Access you may read the Wikipedia article on 'Open Access' or Peter Suber's 'Open Access Overview')

Meaning of Open Access

In MDPI's understanding, and in accordance with the major definitions of Open Access to scientific literature (Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda Declarations), 'Open Access' means:

  • free availability of the literature without any subscription or price barriers
  • immediate open access, rather than delayed open access
  • permission of re-use of the published material, given proper accreditation

Up to 2008 most articles published by MDPI contain the note "© year by MDPI (http://www.mdpi.org). Reproduction is permitted for noncommercial purposes". During 2008 we have started to publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution License. However, all articles published so far should be considered as released under the same Creative Commons Attribution License since 2008.

This means that all articles published in our journals, including data, graphics and supplements, can be linked from outside in, crawled by search engines, re-used by text mining applications or websites, blogs, etc. free of charge under the sole condition of proper accreditation of the source and original publisher.

MDPI is a RoMEO green publisher, see the entry of MDPI at SHERPA RoMEO. RoMEO is a database of Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving information hosted by the University of Nottingham.

Important Note: some articles (especially Reviews) may contain figures, tables or text taken from other publications, for which MDPI does not hold the copyright or the right to re-license this material. Please note that you should enquire with the authors and the original Publisher, if this material can be further re-used.

Advantages of Open Access

Advantages for Authors

Higher Availability, Visibility and Citation Impact - Open Access articles have higher publicity, as they are freely available over the internet without any restrictions, and their full text is accessible to, and searchable from, all search engines. They are easily and quickly added into many literature databases and are more frequently cited [1,2].

Less Costly - Open Access publishing is usually supported by the authors' institutes or their research funding agency through payment of article processing charges (APC) for each accepted article. The APC we collect are currently about:

  • 800 CHF *,** (approximately 780 USD or 500 EUR) per paper for well-written papers and
  • 1'050 CHF per paper for those papers that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.
* For Sensors, the Open Access publishing fees are 1050 CHF per paper for well-written papers and 1300 CHF per paper for those papers that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections, for papers submitted since 1 January 2008.
** For Marine Drugs, the Open Access publishing fees are 1000 CHF per paper for well-written papers and 1250 CHF per paper for those papers that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections, for papers submitted since 1 August 2008.

MDPI's APC are regardless of the length of the paper, because we wish to encourage publication of long papers with complete results and full experimental or computational details [3].

Faster Publication - MDPI's open access journals are online-only journals, whose articles are typically published online more rapidly than traditional, subscription-based and printed journals [4].

Advantages for Readers and Libraries

Immediate Free and Unlimited Access - Readers, mostly other researchers, of open access journals do not need to pay any subscription or pay-per-view charges to read articles published by MDPI.

Links and Notes

  • Open Access citation impact advantage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Authors_and_researchers. For example, a standard research paper "Shutalev, A.D.; Kishko, E.A.; Sivova, N.V.; Kuznetsov, A.Y. Molecules 1998, 3, 100-106" has been cited 51 times, the highest number among all the papers published so far by the same author.
  • Lin, S.-K. Editorial: Non-Open Access and Its Adverse Impact on Molecules. Molecules 2007, 12, 1436-1437 (PDF format 16 K, HTML format).
  • Recently a research paper of 30 pages has been published: Molecules 2008, 13(5), 1081-1110.
  • Some well written papers have been peer reviewed and published in less than two weeks from manuscript submission, see for example: Molecules 2006, 11(4), 212-218.