Information for Librarians and Information Specialists

MDPI History

MDPI is one of the leading open access publishers in the world. It was founded by researchers in Basel, Switzerland in 1996 as an institute to collect, preserve and redistribute rare chemical samples for research purposes. The acronym originally stood for Molecular Diversity Preservation International. The journal Molecules was launched in the same year in collaboration with Springer-Verlag. The journal Molecules was taken over by MDPI in 1997. After 2006, the publication project was gradually separated from the samples preservation initiative. In 2010, MDPI AG was formally registered in Basel as a professional publishing house. The acronym now stands for Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute. The chemical samples preservation initiative was turned into the non-profit MDPI Sustainability Foundation in 2012 and the samples are now distributed through MolMall.

Informational Material

Would you like to share some information on MDPI journals with members at your institution? We have a number of promotional materials readily available to share. Please contact [email protected] to request free copies of posters and flyers (see below for a few examples).

Full-Text Download

If you wish to download the full-text of all papers published in MDPI journals in one batch, you can do so through the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). We offer TAR files with all full-text XML or full-text XML and PDF combined. Please kindly note that new content is only added twice a month, in the middle and end of each month.

We recommend that you use FileZilla or a similar (S)FTP software.

• Protocol: SFTP (note that regular FTP will not work)
• Host: sftp://download.mdpi.com
• Port: 9922
• Logon Type: Normal password
• User: mdpi_public_ftp
• Password: (request at [email protected])

Chemical Structures

We have a SDF file available for download (updated daily). It includes information on chemical structures published in some of our journals.

Indexing & Content Access

MDPI collaborates with a number of indexing databases, platforms, and external companies that wish to index our content. Therefore, we offer a variety of ways to access our publications:

• Through depositing feeds: We offer customized electronic depositing feeds for indexing databases that partner with us. Typically, our feeds deliver content via File Transfer Protocol (FTP), in which we can deliver full-text content as well as metadata. The data is provided either in XML format, PDF format or both.
• Through Crossref: MDPI is a member of Crossref and all of our content is registered with DOIs. All newly published metadata is deposited to Crossref within approximately 24 hours after publication. Please visit Crossref to find further details on metadata retrieval.
• Through the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) interface: MDPI maintains an OAI-PMH interface for metadata sharing and harvesting, which can be accessed at http://oai.mdpi.com. We readily provide the metadata in Dublin Core format (oai_dc set) and in AGRIS format (oai_agris set) for a number of journals related to agronomy and agriculture.
• Through manual download from the search results page: You can export up to 1,000 articles per search result. To ease the process, first set the “Results per Page” to the maximum number of 200.
• Through page scrapping: We provide standardized metadata in Dublin Core, PRISM and Google Scholar formats that are embedded in the source code of each paper's abstract pages.

Please contact [email protected] for more information or if you would like to discuss the possibility of setting up a depositing feed or specialized OAI set with us.

Last updated: 11 November 2021