Open Access (free subscription for readers) Advantages and the Fees

Links and Notes
  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. According to a recent report (Rovner, S. Evolving Access. Chem. Eng. News 3 July 2006, 84 (27), 8) the nonprofit Open Access publishing organization PLoS has just increased its author fees from $1500 USD per article to 2000−2500 USD to better reflect the cost of publication, in addition to other revenue (grants, institutional memberships, and advertisement).
  4. MDPI also plans to increase the amount of Open Access publishing fees to an adequate level effective 1 January 2008.
  5. See: http://www.springeronline.com/openchoice
  6. The traditional subscription-based publishing is even more expensive. The scientific journal subscription has a standard price of 1 USD per page (see the subscription price for journals published by Elsevier or Springer). For example, if a journal has a worldwide circulation of 5,000 copies, for an article of 10 pages, the other parties (readers, libraries, etc.) pay the publishing company 50,000 USD. That is why a single journal e.g., Tetrahedron or Tetrahedron Letters of Elsevier, can bring tens of millions of USD revenue for the publishing house. Elsevier and Springer both started to provide author paid immediate Open Access and the cost of 3,000 USD per paper has been charged to authors [2]. This amount looks very high, yet this Open Access service should be encouraged because Open Access publishing is much less costly for other parties to pay the publishing service.
  7. Recently a research paper of 23 pages has been published: http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/papers/11110867.pdf.
  8. 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.
Dr. Shu-Kun Lin
Publisher of MDPI journals

Last change: 30 January 2008, Webmaster: [email protected]