Derek J. McPhee and Shu-Kun Lin

Received: 30 September 2000 / Published: 13 October 2000

Since its inception Molecules has been published on the Internet under a policy of providing "free subscription" based access, limited lately to the current issue, with archival access only provided to paid subscribers. However, as the number of papers submitted and thus the amount of work involved in publishing the issues has increased steadily with the journal's success, we have been running Molecules under increasingly high financial duress and we are now asking our communities of authors and readers for help in this matter.

A unique feature of Molecules has always been the deposit of samples through MDPI which helps to defray our costs. In order to "encourage" authors to deposit samples with MDPI, we will henceforth make all the papers whose samples are stored at MDPI freely accessible on a permenent basis. If you plan to support MDPI by offering samples, please reply to the letter of acceptance of your paper and inform us of your decision promptly so that we can add the correct sample availability information at the end of your paper. Full instructions for sending samples are available on our website at http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/samples.htm.

Our second potential source of revenue is through personal or corporate subscriptions. Compared to other online journals or traditional journals with online editions, we have what we believe to be a very economical and fair subscription price structure (http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/subs.htm). We ask authors and users to consider this route of support or to ask their institutional libraries to subscribe.

A third and as yet unexplored route is that of corporate sponsorship. Like many other websites, advertising revenue would be a way of covering our costs. Again, we ask our authors and readers for suggestions on how we can achieve some level of economic support by this method.

Finally, if the publication cost of a paper is covered by the authors or their institutions in the form of paid page charges, then that paper will be made available without charge to readers around the world via our Internet access with no password control or IP address control. For additional information see: http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/publguid.htm.

All papers not financed by page charges or sample deposits will be password or IP address controlled and will only be accessible via the paid access license by subscription mentioned above. Naturally, payment of any publication charges or the promise to deposit samples by the authors will be completely independent of the peer reviewed process. We will be seeking a committment to help with funding the journal by one of the mechanisms outlined only after the acceptance of a paper. Molecules is the first peer-reviewed, all-electronic journal on experimental chemistry, and we plan to continue to maintain it as a journal of outstanding scientific quality.

Over the next few issues we will be modifying the the links on the Table of Contents of Molecules to reflect the access level of each paper, although to maximize the dissemination of the information we would like to be able to provide both the current and past issues of Molecules completely free providing a suitable level of funding is achieved. Remember, Molecules is your forum, and its continued existence depends on your help.
 

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