Article Processing Charges (APC) Information

General Information on MDPI’s Article Processing Charges (APC)

MDPI publishes all its journals in full open access, meaning unlimited use and reuse of articles, in addition to giving credit to the authors. All of our articles are published under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license.

Authors pay a one-time Article Processing Charge (APC) to cover the costs of peer review administration and management, professional production of articles in PDF and other formats, and dissemination of published papers in various venues, in addition to other publishing functions. Please note that the option to process an advance payment remains but does not guarantee acceptance of manuscripts. There are no charges for rejected articles, no submission charges, and no surcharges based on the length of an article, figures or supplementary data. Some items (Editorials, Corrections, Addendums, Retractions, Comments, etc.) are published free of charge.

Here is a breakdown of how our APCs are used. In calculating these values, we have followed recommendations from the Fair Open Access Alliance, an organization that promotes sustainable and transparent scholarly open access publishing. This also makes MDPI fully compliant with the requirements of Plan S, a key funder initiative to promote Open Access.

1. Publishing Operations & Projects

MDPI develops and maintains its own electronic submission and peer-review website. We also run several platforms to offer different types of services for scholars, as detailed in our MDPI Initiatives page.

2. Journal publication

• Triaging: Filtering of papers upon submission by internal staff and editorial board members.
• Organization of peer-review: MDPI provides a high degree of assistance to Academic Editors so that they can only focus on editorial decisions. We employ in-house editors to invite reviewers, collect review reports, communicate with authors and reviewers, correspond with authors about revision, and more.
• Production: Copy-editing, typesetting, XML and PDF conversion, and language editing (English editing is provided by native English speakers for all accepted papers).
• Proofreading: Corresponding with authors to approve the final text and requesting any missing information.
• Other editorial assistance: Handling any questions and requests for support before submission, during the editorial and peer-review process, or post-publication.
• Journal management & development: In-house Managing Editors track key performance indicators of each journal, and monitor competing journals and trends in the field. They also provide reports and hold discussions with the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board.
• Indexing & archiving: MDPI has a dedicated team that works to continuously expand post-publication coverage of all our journals within the main academic databases, scope-specific databases and country-specific journal ranking lists.
• Digital preservation: All MDPI journals are digitally preserved cover-to-cover, by the Swiss National Library and CLOCKSS, ensuring long-term archival of all of our publications.

3. Editorial Fees

MDPI pays a travel grant or stipend to all Editors-in-Chief and a share of revenue to the societies whose journals it publishes.

4. Marketing and Communication

MDPI allocates part of its income to the promotion of journals and articles through sponsorships of conferences, scholarly society events, and other promotional activities, as well as a series of awards to support researchers.

5. General

• Management & administration includes costs related to salaries of non-editorial staff and other business costs. They include all the fees paid by MDPI for membership in publishing organizations, such as the STM Association, OASPA, and the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), as well as additional publishing services such as Publons. Most membership fees are based on the level of income or size of the publisher.
• Taxes.
• MDPI supports the activities of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation, including coordinating the World Sustainability Forum and World Sustainability Awards.
• MDPI is a debt-free company and is not repaying loans or investments.

6. Discounts and waivers

MDPI is committed to supporting the transition of all research to fully open access, therefore we regularly offer APC waivers or discounts. On average, we waive approximately 25% - 27% of our content every year. Of the total APCs in a journal, we waive and offer discounts ranging from 15% in our most established journals, up to 100% in our new or humanities journals. In many social sciences and humanities journals we waive between 70% - 100% of APCs (an APC is still displayed on these journal's websites, in order to demonstrate to authors that there is a cost to publication). Even some of our well-established journals waive 30% of publishing costs each year.

Additionally members of societies affiliated to an MDPI journal benefit from a discount, as well as authors affiliated to institutions participating in our Institutional Open Access Program.

For journals in fields with low levels of funding, where authors typically do not have funds available, APCs are typically waived and cross-subsidized from fields for which more APC funding is available. For authors from low- and middle-income countries, waivers or discounts may be granted on a case-by-case basis. Applications submitted before article submission are assessed by the Managing Editor based on the quality of the research article and the authors’ ability to pay.

The APC by journal is given in the table below.