MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) history and corporate video
MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is a publisher of open access journals based in Basel, Switzerland.
With more than 5,5000 employees and offices in Beijing, Wuhan, Tianjin and Nanjing (China), Barcelona (Spain), Belgrade and Novi Sad (Serbia), Manchester (UK), Tokyo (Japan), Cluj and Bucharest (Romania), Toronto (Canada), Kraków (Poland), Singapore (Singapore) and Bangkok (Thailand), MDPI is considered one of the largest publishers of open access journals.
MDPI has published the research of more than 330,000 individual authors, and its journals receive more than 25 million monthly webpage views.
HISTORY
MDPI was founded and registered in 1996 as Molecular Diversity Preservation International (also abbreviated MDPI) in Basel, Switzerland, by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin to promote and preserve the diversity of chemical compound samples. The same year, the journal Molecules was launched in collaboration with the publishing house Springer (today Springer Science + Business Media) as one of the first electronic journals in chemistry.
In 1997, MDPI took over the journal Molecules from Springer and started to publish it as an open access journal.
In 1997, MDPI held the Electronic Conference on Synthetic Organic Chemistry (ECSOC), one of the first scientific MDPI events that was entirely virtual and held online with no fees for participants, scientists and researchers.
In 1998, MDPI registered the domains www.preprints.net and www.reprints.net, planning to launch a service to collect draft manuscripts (preprints) and accepted manuscripts of published articles (reprints), thus offering early and free access to publications that are otherwise only accessible through a subscription. This idea was finally realized in 2016.
In 1999, the journal Entropy was founded. The Editorial Board of Entropy comprised two Nobel Laureates, Prof. Dr. Philip W. Anderson from Princeton University and Prof. Dr. Kenneth J. Arrow from Stanford University, among other eminent researchers.
In 2000, the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS) was first published. Prof. Dr. Jerzy Leszczynski was the founding Editor-in-Chief and two Nobel Laureates were on the Editorial Board, Dr. Jerome Karle from the Naval Research Laboratory and Prof. Dr. Yuan-Tseh Lee from the Academia Sinica.
In 2000, Dr. Francis Muguet (ENSTA, Paris, France) helped to maintain the MDPI server and established a network with several mirror servers across Europe and North America, providing fast and free access to the MDPI publications to scientists and researchers.
In 2001, The journal Sensors was launched as a result of a conversation held between Prof. Dr. Ursula E. Spichiger-Keller and Dr. Lin during a train ride in Switzerland.
In 2002, MDPI registered the domain www.sciforum.net, planning to launch so-called “bulletin boards”, which are scientific discussion groups and mailing lists for researchers to exchange ideas, as well as holding electronic online conferences. This vision of the digital event planning platform that supports open science was realized only later in 2009.
In 2003, the open access journal Marine Drugs was launched.
In 2004, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) was launched.
In 2005, MDPI officially adopted the term “Open Access” for its publication model.
In 2008, MDPI purchased the domain www.mdpi.com to host the future publication system for all academic MDPI journals.
In 2008, MDPI also adopted the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system for all its scientific journals, and publications were released under the terms of the least restrictive Creative Commons By Attribution (CC-BY) license model.
In 2009, twelve new journals started publication: Cancers, Diversity, Future Internet, Nutrients, Pharmaceutics, Polymers, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Symmetry, Toxins, Viruses, and Water.
In 2009, a new system was also launched to host electronic conferences at Sciforum.net.
In 2010, MDPI AG (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) was founded as an operating company for scientific open access journals by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf. MDPI continued to use the acronym of the newly founded “Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute”, and the samples project continues today, being maintained by the MDPI Sustainability Foundation.
In 2011, the MDPI submission and manuscript handling system (SuSy) is launched for all MDPI journals.
In 2013, MDPI started its own indexing database of open access journals OALit (later Scilit) by sourcing and merging publication metadata from DOAJ, CrossRef and PubMed, and thus providing an alternative to the DOAJ. The first version of Scilit.net was released, and an institutional membership was setup in the fall of 2013.
In 2013, the MDPI Magazine was also launched to highlight some of the research published in the journals.
In 2014, Scilit was expanded to include all types of publications (not only the ones available with an open access license). Using Scilit data, a first version of the Publisher & Journals Rankings was released.
In 2016, MDPI launched Preprints.org as a multi-disciplinary platform for early showcasing of articles in all research fields and disciplines. Preprints allows scientists to post preprints of their manuscripts and public commenting/peer-review.
In 2018, MDPI took first place among DOAJ Gold publishers of open access journals for the first time, in terms of the number of articles published in a year.
In 2019, SciProfiles was launched, a scholarly networking platform allowing academic users to enrich their profiles with data such as Orcid and research keywords, as well as to connect with other scholars. At “Sciforum”, an interactive conference builder was set up. It provides an easy way of setting up a conference website for independent conference organizers.
*Information from Wikipedia.org, www.mdpi.com, and www.mdpi.com/anniversary25.
**Video published on YouTube.com by “MDPI“.