MDPI Open Access Information and Policy

External Open Access Resources

MDPI is a RoMEO green publisher — RoMEO is a database of Publishers' copyright and self-archiving policies hosted by the University of Nottingham

If you are new to the concept of open access, you may visit one of the following websites or watch the below 'Open Access 101' video:

Wikipedia article on 'Open Access'
Peter Suber's 'Open Access Overview'
Information Platform Open Access [in English, in German]
SHERPA's 'Authors and Open Access'

SPARC Open Access 101 Video

Meaning of Open Access

In MDPI's understanding, which is in accordance with major definitions of open access to scientific literature (namely the Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda declarations), open access means:

• peer-reviewed literature is freely available without subscription or price barriers,
• literature is immediately released in open access format (no embargo period), and
• published material can be re-used without obtaining permission as long as a correct citation to the original publication is given.

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

This means that all articles published in MDPI 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 believes that open access publishing can foster the exchange of research results amongst scientists from different disciplines, thus facilitating interdisciplinary research, whilst providing access to research results to researchers world-wide, including from developing countries, as well as to an interested general public. Although MDPI publishes all of its journals under the open access model, we believe that open access is an enriching part of the scholarly communication process that can and should co-exist with other forms of communication and publication, such as society-based publishing and conferencing activities.

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 the published material. Please note that you should inquire with the original copyright holder (usually the original Publisher or the original authors), if this material can be further re-used.

Advantages of Open Access for Authors

High Availability and High Visibility of open access articles is guaranteed through the free and unlimited accessibility of the publication over the Internet without any restrictions. Everyone can freely access and download the full-text of all articles published with MDPI. 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. open access publications are also more easily included and searchable in search engines and indexing databases.

Higher Citation Impact of open access articles due to their high publicity and availability. It has been demonstrated that open access publications are more frequently cited [1,2].

Less Costly — Open Access Publishers cover their costs for editorial handling and editing of a paper by charging authors' institutes or research funding agency. The cost of handling and the production of an article is covered through the one-time payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC) for each accepted article. The APC of Open Access Publishers are only a fraction of the average income per paper that traditional, subscription-based Publishers have been earning. MDPI's Article Processing Charge (APC) is regardless of the length of an article, because we wish to encourage publication of long papers with complete results and full experimental or computational details [3].

Faster Publication in MDPI's open access journals is achieved by the online-only availability. Accepted articles are typically published online more rapidly in MDPI journals than traditional, subscription-based and printed journals [4].

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.