The MDPI Story Three Decades of Advancing Open Access

Molecules was launched online to document and share rare chemical compounds, based on the founding idea that unique substances created in research labs should be preserved and made available to science.

MDPI took full ownership of Molecules from Springer and published it as a free, online-only journal, years before the open access (OA) movement came together around the Budapest Declaration. In the same year, the first Electronic Conference on Synthetic Organic Chemistry (ECSOC) was held entirely online, free of charge.

The journal Entropy was founded with two Nobel laureates, Philip W. Anderson and Kenneth J. Arrow, joining its Editorial Board. This was an early signal that OA publishing could command the highest levels of scientific recognition.

The International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS) began publishing around the turn of the century; it is now ranked among the top 25% of journals in organic chemistry and molecular biology.

The fourth journal was launched in 2001, marking MDPI's expansion beyond chemistry into the physical sciences and engineering. Covering everything from biosensors to remote sensing and industrial instrumentation, it grew into one of the most widely read open access journals in its field.

MDPI introduced its first online manuscript submission system based on Open Journal Systems and adopted an in-house editorial model, piloted with the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. This was the organizational foundation for everything that followed.

Twenty years ago, Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, Derek J. McPhee, and Francis F. Muguet published an editorial in Entropy formally establishing open access as MDPI's publishing model and core philosophy.

MDPI joined Crossref, assigned DOIs to all its articles retroactively, and adopted the Creative Commons Attribution license for all past and future publications. The new publication system launched at www.mdpi.com in October of that year, and the first Chinese branch office was established in Beijing.

The academic conference platform Sciforum was launched, enabling scholars to organize online events free of charge. Registered as a domain name back in 2002, seven years later this vision had become a reality.

The fully in-house SuSy manuscript handling system was launched across all journals, streamlining the editorial process. MDPI also held the first World Sustainability Forum, addressing a range of challenges in sustainable development.

Four MDPI journals (Toxins, Remote Sensing, Water, and Polymers) were accepted for coverage by the Science Citation Index Expanded, marking the beginning of systematic recognition by the world's leading academic indexing databases.

MDPI developed and launched Scilit, a multidisciplinary literature search platform built from Crossref, PubMed, and DOAJ metadata.

That same year, the Technical University of Munich became the first partner in what is now the Institutional Open Access Program, allowing universities to pre-fund article charges for their researchers.

With a median time from submission to publication of 69 days, or ten weeks, MDPI journals ranked among the fastest in the industry. MDPI also joined the ORCID community, integrating persistent researcher identifiers into its workflow.

MDPI launched Preprints.org, a free multidisciplinary preprint platform allowing researchers to share their findings before peer review. The idea had first been registered as a domain name in 1998; it took nearly two decades to realize. That same year, MDPI joined SPARC and the United Nations Global Compact, and was recognized by the Wellcome Trust as a compliant open access publisher.

To mark its 20th anniversary, MDPI established the Tu Youyou Award, awarded for outstanding contributions in natural products and medicinal chemistry, and the MDPI Sustainability Foundation, along with the World Sustainability Award for breakthrough research in sustainable development. Additionally, both Molecules and Sensors published their 10,000th papers that year.

With nearly 36,000 peer-reviewed articles published, a 52% increase on the prior year, MDPI became the leading fully open access publisher by output according to DOAJ. MDPI's journal portfolio exceeded 100 titles and its global workforce surpassed 1000 people.

MDPI released the Journal and Article Management System (JAMS), offering its editorial technology to external institutional publishers. It also launched MDPI Books, extending the reach of its content beyond the journal article.

The academic social platform SciProfiles was launched, allowing researchers to build profiles and connect with peers. With over 106,000 articles published in a single year, MDPI also reached a scale that placed it among the five largest academic publishers in the world by annual output.

MDPI marked its 25th anniversary with a cumulative total surpassing 700,000 published articles and a global workforce of nearly 6000 people.

In December 2022, MDPI reached the milestone of one million total articles published, a figure that would have been difficult to conceive when Molecules published its first 74 papers in 1997. The number of active journals surpassed 400, and that same year, MDPI officially joined the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Publishers Compact.

A collaboration with ResearchGate brought MDPI's journals and articles to one of the world's largest academic networking platforms, substantially increasing discoverability and reach for contributing researchers.

MDPI joined the STM Integrity Hub of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers and became an affiliate member of CHORUS, providing public access solutions for U.S. funding agencies.

MDPI established the Michele Parrinello Award and the Tang Youqi Award, recognizing outstanding contributions in computational materials science and chemistry, respectively, and expanding its portfolio of scientific recognition.

By the end of 2025, 330 MDPI journals were indexed in Web of Science and more than 50 were indexed in Ei Compendex, with the global MDPI workforce exceeding 8,000 people.

Preprints.org reached the milestone of 100,000 preprints shared since its launch in 2016, supported by more than 350,000 researchers, readers, Advisory Board Members, and screeners worldwide.

MDPI's partnership with ResearchGate was extended to cover 200 journals, building on the initial pilot and further increasing the global reach of the company's open access content.

From a single chemistry journal and a molecular sample archive in Basel, MDPI has grown into one of the world's largest publishers of open access scientific content. The conviction that scientific knowledge should be immediately and freely available to all, stated clearly in a 2006 editorial in Entropy, remains the organizing principle of MDPI's operations.