Open Access Advantages and the Article Processing Charges (APC)

Open Access (Free Access for Readers) Advantages and the Article Processing Charges (APC) for Accepted Manuscripts

Much higher citation impact: Open Access papers are much more frequently cited [1,2]. They have higher publicity because they are free to read and the full text is searchable on the Internet and they are more quickly and easily added into many indexing databases.
Much less costly: Open Access publishing is supported by authors and their institutes and is much less costly. Article processing charges (APC) for publication in open access format MDPI collects are:
- 800 CHF ^{*, **} (approximately 500 EUR) per paper for well-written papers and
- 1050 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 starting 1 August 2008.

MDPI collects the same amount of APC 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]. Instructions for transfer of funds to MDPI are available at the http://www.mdpi.org/transfer.htm website.
Open Access papers are typically published online more rapidly [4].
Authors retain copyright of their articles, which will be distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license.
Waiver of publication fees: this has been stopped in January 2008.

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, raw data as Excel files available at the end of the HTML file).
Recently a research paper of 30 pages has been published: http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/papers/13051081.pdf.
Well written papers have been peer reviewed and published in less than two weeks from manuscript submission, see the example: http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/papers/11040212.pdf.

Shu-Kun Lin, Ph.D.
Publisher of MDPI journals