Since last year, we have resumed use of a two tier publication system, whereby we have continued 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 [1]. However, MDPI fully supports the Open Access publication model and its journals have been well-know fully Open Access publications for many years, which raises the question: can we find a way to make our journals fully Open Access again?
One option is to publish those papers whose authors do not want to pay Open Access publishing fees in non-Open Access form for a certain period of time, before making them Open Access — so called “delayed Open Access”.
Because we would ultimately grant Open Access to these papers, we consider that there should be some restrictions for papers accepted for processing in this fashion:
These papers should be recommended by referees as quite high quality papers.
They should be recommended by the Editors as high quality papers with extensive literature reviews and full experimental details [2].
They would be quickly processed by the editorial office as Full Papers with reasonably large amount of contents and theoretical, computational and/or experimental details. This has been stated in the “Aims and Scope” of our journals [3,4]. See also my first editorial policy statement [5].
The unconditional full Open Access publishing unfortunately has been abused by some authors who after publication then refused to pay any fees, in many cases after agreeing to do so in writing [1]. The choice to publish in non-Open Access form can also be abused by authors who want the papers to be published but do not necessarily wish them to be very accessible (usually short papers or those of lesser quality). If we want to make our journals fully Open Access again, we will feel very strongly that we must discourage submission of these low quality or short papers.
As always, we welcome our reader’s opinions on these matters. Messages with a suitable Subject header should be sent to lin@mdpi.org.
References and Notes
- 1.Lin S.-K. Open Access and Author’s Open Choice. Molecules. 2005;10:583–584. (PDF format 16 K at http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/papers/10060583.pdf ; HTML format at http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/html/10060583.htm. )(b) For more information, visit the www.mdpi.org/oaj-supports.htm website.
- 2.McPhee D.J., Lin S.-K. Editorial: Invitation: High Quality Papers with Extensive Literature Review and Full Experimental Details. Molecules. 2001;6 i (PDF format 14 K at http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/papers/6010000i.pdf , HTML format at http://www.mdpi.org /molecules/html/6010000i.htm. ) [Google Scholar]
- 3.“Our aim is to encourage scientists to publish their theoretical and experimental details in as much detail as possible. There is no restriction on the length of the papers. If there are computational results, the full experimental details must be provided so that the results can be reproduced.” Visit: http://www.mdpi.org/ijms/aims.htm.
- 4.“Our aim is to encourage chemists to publish as much as possible their experimental detail, particularly synthetic procedures and characterization information. There is no restriction on the length of the experimental section.” Visit: http://www.mdpi.org/ijms/aims.htm.
- 5.Lin S.-K. Editorial: A Good Yield and a High Standard. Molecules. 1996;1:1–2. (http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/html/edito96.htm. ) [Google Scholar]