Academic open-access publisher Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) has announced a pilot project with the Technical University of Dresden (TUD) and the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) to help scholars publish Open Access at no cost. The program will last for 6 months, from July 1 - December 31, 2018, and will allow corresponding authors affiliated with these institutions to publish their manuscripts free of charge in any MDPI journal.
When publishing Gold Open Access, authors are often asked to pay a fee, known as article processing charges (APC). Their work is made freely available for readers, bringing verifiably more visibility to their research. Many universities, such as the TUD, offer central funding to help authors publish Open Access, if certain criteria are fulfilled.
With Open Access standing as a model for the future, MDPI is trying to find new ways to support authors, one of which being the Access Flat Rate initiative with the TUD. This means that scientists who want to publish their work Open Access no longer need to deal with APCs. The TUD also understands the project as a contribution to the innovative development of Open Access services.
This is not the first time that MDPI has experimented with making Open Access publishing more attractive and easily accessible for authors. As of 2018, Humanities and Social Sciences authors can have the APCs of some of their articles covered via the Knowledge Unlatched crowd-funding mechanism.
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