For the last ten years we have devoted our time and financial resources
to Open Access electronic (online) journal publication [1-3]. During
this time we have tried to balance the commitment to scientific
publication with the realities of sustaining such an enterprise
financially. As our readership and authors will be aware from previous
editorials, authors’ contributions of publication fees have been our
main source of revenue. As clearly stipulated in our Instructions for
Authors, this was always based on an honour system whereby authors
would be invoiced after acceptance and publication of their papers, and
requests for reduced payments were always considered based on the
respective author’s circumstances, but increasingly this has been
abused by authors who after publication have then ignored our requests
for payment, while at the same time the number of papers submitted,
processed and published has increased dramatically, leading to the need
to set up and staff an Editorial Office to handle these tasks. We have
therefore decided that effective immediately and for all MDPI journals
we shall have a two tier system, in which we will continue to offer
full Open Access publication to those authors willing to contribute
financially to support this option, while providing authors with the
alternative choice of free publication without Open Access for those
who prefer not to pay. This was essentially the policy in effect during
1997-2001.
All the papers published will be listed in a common Table of Contents
file, but only the Open Access papers will have a relative link to the
folder on the mdpi.net server where the pdf files are uploaded. These
Open Access papers will be mirrored on several servers, with mdpi.net
as the main server. The non-Open Access papers will have an absolute
link leading to a blocked (password protected) folder on the mdpi.org
server.
mdpi.org
Hosts all papers
Password protected
mdpi.net
Hosts only Open Access papers
Open Access. Mirrored
Thus, we will provide those authors who do not wish to support Open
Access the choice of doing so, knowing that their papers will only be
available to paid subscribers, who will continue to have full access.
We will continue to set very low publication fees, compared to the fees
collected, for example, by Springer Verlag, for their Open Choice plan
[4].
References and Notes
1. McPhee, D.J.; Lin, S.-K. Editorial: Molecules after 10 Years: the
Best is Yet to Come. Molecules 2005, 10, 1-2.
2. Muguet, F.F.; McPhee, D.J.; Lin, S.-K. New Development: A Printed
Edition. Molecules 2002, 7, 858-860.
3. McPhee, D.J.; Lin, S.-K. Editorial: Invitation: High Quality Papers
with Extensive Literature Review and Full Experimental Details. Molecules 2001, 6, i.
4. For more information, visit the www.mdpi.org/oaj-supports.htm
website.