Full Open Access Publishing Policy Imposed in 2007: Molecules Publishes Many More Papers This Year – More than 2000 Pages Published up to Issue 8

We are proud to be publishing page 2000 of the current volume of Molecules, in this issue 8 (August 2007), while last year we published only 1014 pages during the whole year. We have accomplished this without compromising quality, as this year we have maintained our rejection rate. Since 1 January 2007 we have received 342 manuscripts. Among the papers processed to date 148 papers have been rejected and 145 papers have been published or accepted.

In 2005 and 2006 MDPI journals published papers in both non-Open Access and Open Access form [1,2,3]. During the first years of publication of Molecules as an Open Access journal, the Open Access publishing fees were paid as voluntary donations, but these publication fee contributions were not enough to cover costs of editorial work and production [1].

Since September 2006, we have published papers exclusively in Open Access form. Except for a few very high quality papers whose publishing fees have been waived according to our policy on this [4], we have collected the full amount of fees for all the published papers. With the increased revenue we have been able to set up and staff the Editorial Office to handle papers submitted to MDPI journals. In addition to the normal proper peer-reviewing procedure, we have been able to process papers more quickly. The obvious increase in the number of published quality papers shows that our paid, full Open Access publishing policy is healthy.

As always, we welcome our reader’s opinions on these matters. Messages with a suitable Subject header should be sent to lin@mdpi.org.