30 Years of Pioneering Open Access
Open Access has evolved to become the most widely accepted model for scientific publishing. For 30 years, MDPI has pioneered this movement to make research results freely available to anyone, anywhere.
What began as a bold idea has grown into a portfolio of more than 500 fully Open Access journals, supported by a global community of researchers, editors, and reviewers who make this exchange of knowledge possible.
As of June 2026, 4.6 million researchers have published in MDPI journals, with article views and downloads reaching 1.9 billion in 2025 alone.
In this article, we look back at how MDPI has pioneered Open Access for more than 30 years, growing into the world’s largest fully Open Access scholarly publisher.
Academia before Open Access
Ever since ancient times, the process of sharing ideas and disseminating knowledge has been intertwined with societal development. Dating back to Mesopotamian and Greek civilizations, scholars congregated in public spaces, such as early schools and libraries, to share their ideas and knowledge.
However, ‘sharing’ in this context has not always denoted equitable access to information. The world’s first libraries were exclusive to the scholarly elite, and for centuries, access to information remained tied to financial privilege.
When the first academic journals were established in the 17th century, access to information remained inherently tied to class. This prevailed as the subscription-based model further consolidated restricted access to valuable research.
Over time, more people would have the opportunity to access scholarly research, but it came at a cost. These costs continued to rise and, in the 20th century, journal subscription costs were growing faster than inflation. This placed an immense burden on library budgets and became known as the ‘serial crisis’.
The serial crisis represented a pressing issue for the scholarly community as libraries found it increasingly difficult to afford to access the research their scholars needed. This imbalance hindered the dissemination of scientific communication and highlighted the systemic challenges of the subscription-based model.
With the advent of the Internet, information could now be accessible anywhere, at any time, and by anyone with a computer. This presented a radical opportunity to introduce an alternative to the increasingly expensive subscription-based model.
Founded on a bold idea
MDPI was founded in 1996 in Basel, Switzerland. Then short for Molecular Diversity Preservation International, MDPI first served as a repository for rare chemical samples.
Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, MDPI’s Founder, believed that chemical compounds developed by researchers around the world were worthwhile collecting, preserving, and sharing.
This early commitment to enhanced accessibility would be formalised with the launch of Molecules, one of the first free-to-read, electronic journals on chemistry.
In the journal’s first editorial piece, titled ‘A Good Yield and a High Standard’, Dr. Lin outlined his vision for the journal:
“This procedure will make a chemist’s intellectual contribution even more worthwhile, not only to further academic research, but also to support industry in the development of pharmaceutical, agrochemical and other chemical products.” – Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, Molecules (1996).
In 1997, the Electronic Conference on Synthetic Organic Chemistry (ECSOC) was one of the first scientific MDPI events which was entirely virtual and held no fees for participants, scientists, and researchers. In the essence of preservation, its proceedings are still available today.
In the years following, the success of Molecules was punctuated with the introduction of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS), Entropy, and Sensors. This was significant for MDPI as it represented its first move to expand across fields, which would become instrumental to its forthcoming growth.
An emerging global movement
In addition to MDPI, this period saw the emergence of other platforms such as arXiv and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, which similarly championed Open Access values.
Highlighting both the growing dissatisfaction with expensive subscription costs and the potential of leveraging digital technologies for driving wider dissemination, the movement towards Open Access was beginning to form.
Members of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) convened in December 2001 and released the Budapest Declaration in February 2002. Here, the term ‘Open Access’ was first coined and defined as “free availability on the public internet”, allowing users to read, distribute, and cite work without restrictions.
This laid the foundation for Open Access publishing as we know it today.
This was followed by The Berlin Declaration in 2003, which established two basic requirements for any scholarly Open Access publication. Firstly, the retention of the copyright by the author and, secondly, the long-term availability of an electronic copy of the published work.
Strengthening foundations to support expansion
With Open Access firmly established as MDPI’s core value, the next step involved expanding its portfolio of journals to increase accessibility across disciplines.
To facilitate this growth, MDPI introduced its first online manuscript submission system in 2005, eventually evolving into SuSy. Furthermore, an in-house editorial model was piloted with IJMS, which today ranks among the top 25% of journals in organic chemistry and molecular biology, according to Scopus. This represented the organisational foundation for MDPI’s editorial infrastructure.
Supporting this, in 2008, MDPI joined Crossref, assigning digital object identifiers (DOIs) to all its articles retroactively and adopting the Creative Commons Attribution license for all past and future publications.
By developing in-house infrastructure and introducing industry-standard identifiers and licensing, MDPI further refined quality control, increased visibility, and clarified author and reuse rights. Overall, these steps further integrated the research published in MDPI journals into the scholarly ecosystem.
This is best demonstrated by how, in 2012, four MDPI journals (Toxins, Remote Sensing, Water, and Polymers) were accepted for coverage by the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science), marking the beginning of the systematic recognition of MDPI journals by the world’s leading academic indexing databases.
Advancing open science at scale
In 2017, with nearly 36,000 peer-reviewed articles published, MDPI became the leading fully Open Access publisher by output according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – a title which it still holds.
Furthermore, in 2022, after celebrating its 25th anniversary in the prior year, MDPI reached the milestone of 1 million total articles published. This number signals the growth of MDPI as well as the growing number of authors choosing openness.
With a workforce exceeding 8000 people, more than 500 journals, and more than 330 journals indexed in Web of Science at the end of 2025, MDPI’s achievements can be easily represented in numbers. However, its greatest success is leading the global transition to open science, as seen in the growing number of national and institutional policies supporting, and increasingly requiring, the open dissemination of research.
This core value, that scientific knowledge should be immediately and freely available to all, remains the organising principle of MDPI’s operations.
Openness beyond research
Sharing results represents just one part of the research endeavour. Accordingly, MDPI’s efforts extend into various activities that empower the academic community.
These include:
- Conferences: an international offering of conferences, including events such as the Z-Forum on Sustainability and Innovation, and conferences organised by MDPI for journal communities.
- Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP): partnerships allow universities to pre-fund article charges for their researchers. More than 1000 partners are now part of the program.
- Awards: a wide range of journal and flagship awards, with the total prize sum amounting to 1.2 million Swiss francs in 2025 alone. These reward academic communities and acknowledge exceptional research across a diverse range of disciplines.
- Preprints.org: a free multidisciplinary preprint platform allowing researchers to share their findings before peer review. The platform hosts more than 100,000 preprints and is supported by more than 350,000 researchers, Advisory Board Members, and screeners worldwide.
- Scilit: a free and comprehensive content aggregator platform for scholarly publications. The platform features more than 185 million publications, of which more than 48 million are Open Access.
- JAMS: a platform that simplifies academic publishing by integrating all key journal management tasks into a single, intuitive platform.
For Open Access to grow effectively, the academic community must be supported with the infrastructure and opportunities that make all the essential steps of the research process possible.
By supporting and organising conferences to bring researchers together, recognising and rewarding excellence, partnering with leading institutions, and creating platforms for sharing research results, MDPI is fostering the culture of openness within the academic community.
Pioneering Open Access
MDPI’s journey from a single journal to the world’s leading fully Open Access publisher has been made possible by a global community of researchers, editors, and reviewers believing in the core conviction that scientific knowledge should be shared immediately and freely with everyone.
As explained by Stefan Tochev, Chief Executive Officer,
With over half of the world’s research now open access, it is the most widely accepted model for scientific publishing.
MDPI has been part of the shift from the very beginning, and our continued investment in people, technology, and ethical standards ensures we remain a publisher that researchers can trust and rely on.
MDPI is a pioneer in scholarly Open Access publishing that has continued to serve scholars from around the world to ensure the latest research is freely available and openly accessible to all.
Thank you to the global community of researchers, editors, and reviewers for their dedication and support in making this possible.
Learn more about MDPI at 30 here.
