MDPI Open Access Information and Policy

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. This means the following:

• Everyone has free and unlimited access to the full texts of all articles published in MDPI journals;
• Everyone is free to reuse the published material if the original article is properly accredited and cited;
• Open access publication is supported by the authors' institutes or research funding agencies via the payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.

No special permission is required to reuse all or part of articles published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Commons CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that it is clearly cited. The reuse of an article does not imply endorsement from the authors or MDPI. Furthermore, no special permission is required for authors to submit their research to external repositories. This policy extends to all versions of a paper, including its submitted, accepted, and published forms.

In accordance with major definitions in the scientific literature (namely the Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda Declarations), MDPI defines open access by the following conditions:

• The peer-reviewed literature is freely available without subscription or price barriers;
• The literature is immediately released in open access format (with no embargo period);
• Published material can be reused without obtaining permission as long as a correct citation to the original publication is given.

Until 2008, most articles published by MDPI contained the following note: "© year by MDPI (http://www.mdpi.org). Reproduction is permitted for noncommercial purposes". During 2008, MDPI journals started to publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution License and they now use the latest version of the CC BY license, which grants authors the most extensive rights. All articles published by MDPI before and during 2008 should now be considered to have been released under the post-2008 Creative Commons Attribution license.

This means that all articles published in MDPI journals, including their data, graphics, and supplementary material, can be linked by external sources, scanned by search engines, and reused by text mining applications, websites, or blogs, free of charge under the sole condition that the source and original publisher are properly accredited. MDPI believes that open access publishing fosters the exchange of research results amongst scientists from different disciplines, thus facilitating interdisciplinary research. Open access publishing also allows for the dissemination of scholarly findings to researchers worldwide, including those from developing countries, and to the general public. Although MDPI publishes all of its journals using the open access model, we believe that this is an enriching part of the scholarly process that can and should co-exist with other forms of communication and publication, such as society-based publishing and conferencing activities.

Important Note: Some articles (especially Reviews) may contain figures, tables, or text taken from other publications, for which MDPI does not hold the copyright or the right to re-license. Please note that you should inquire with the original copyright holder (usually the original publisher or authors) whether or not this material can be reused.

The High Availability and Visibility of our open access articles are guaranteed through their free and unlimited accessibility over the Internet. Everyone can freely access and download the full texts of all articles published with MDPI; this means that our readers, i.e., mostly other researchers, do not need to pay any subscription or pay-per-view charges. Open access publications are also more likely to be included in search engines and indexing databases.

The Higher Citation Impact of open access articles results from their high publicity and availability. Open access publications are demonstrably more frequently cited [1,2].

Lower Publishing Costs: Lower publishing costs are ensured by open access publishers, who cover their costs for editorially processing papers by charging authors' institutes or research funding agencies. The cost of handling and producing each accepted article is covered through the one-time payment of an article processing charge (APC). The APCs of open access publishers are only a fraction of the average income per paper earned by traditional, subscription-based publishers. MDPI's article processing charge (APC) is the same, irrespective of article length, because we wish to encourage the publication of long papers with complete results and full experimental or computational details [3].

Faster Publication in MDPI's open access journals is achieved by online-only availability. Accepted articles are typically published online more rapidly in MDPI journals than they are in traditional, subscription-based and printed journals [4].

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).
3. A research paper of 30 pages has been published: Molecules 2008, 13(5), 1081-1110.
4. Some well written papers have been peer-reviewed and published in less than two weeks from manuscript submission, see e.g.: Molecules 2006, 11(4), 212-218.