Open Access Scientific Journals 

Open Society
Preservation of the Scientific Public Domain
Global Inclusion

Dr. Francis Muguet / ENSTA (http://www.ensta.fr/~muguet)
Dr. Shu-Kun Lin / MDPI (http://www.mdpi.org/lin)

DRAFT of the PROJECT

The goal is to establish a general gateway to Open Access Journals, somewhat similar to a portal like BioMed Central, which presents itself as an "Open Access Publisher" except that this portal would not be operated by a commercial entity. The immediate goal of this program would be to start the implementation of such a project in Chemistry and related scientific fields. Existing MDPI journals are to be included inside the new portal.

In fact, we believe it would be possible to promote the creation of new open access journals that would be hosted by OPENACCESSJOURNALS.ORG once the editors are assured that they do not have to maintain a WWW server on their own, and all needed e-publishing open source software is implemented, and upgraded. In fact, it is what the commercial publisher BioMed Central is already doing: hosting previously existing electronic journals, and promoting many new biomedical journals while providing a specialized web magazine hosting service.

While the project will be focused on chemical sciences, from the start we would try to establish a general non-profit portal for Open Access Journals in any scientific field. Of course, considering existing journals, only a mirror copy may be hosted at our portal, if the editor may wish to maintain his/her original site. In fact, the portal might host a copy of any existing Open Access journal, this is possible since they are freely downloadable Open Access journals, but we would rather work in agreement with the editors. A commoun set of software tools and linking tools and OAI compliance would be required. During the course of this project, MDPI might be happy to cooperate with other similar initiatives in other fields, so that a unified multidisciplinary project might emerged. 

OAI-compliance : All journals hosted in this portal, should constitute OAI-compliant Archives with the help of Open Source software GNU EPrints. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is supported by the Digital Library Federation, the Coalition for Networked Information, National Science Foundation Grant No. IIS-9817416 (Project Prism). OAI-compliance means all Archives created in this way are "interoperable." They use the same (OAI) convention for tagging their metadata (author, title, date, journal, etc.). That means the contents of all such Archives can be harvested integrated, navigated and searched seamlessly, as if they were all in one global "virtual" archive.


Dr. Francis Muguet is a research scientist at ENSTA, Paris, France. For details see http://www.ensta.fr/~muguet/openaccess. He is on the Board of MDPI.
Mailing address: Dr. Francis F. Muguet 
Laboratoire de Mathématiques Appliquées, ENSTA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées), 32 Boulevard Victor, 75739 Paris Cedex, France.
Tel: (33) 1.45.52.60.19, Fax: (33) 1.45.52.52.82, [email protected]  
 
Dr. Shu-Kun Lin is the president of MDPI (Molecular Diversity Preservation International).
Mailing address: Matthaeusstrasse 11, CH-4057 Basel, Switzerland, Tel. +41 79 322 3379, Fax +41 61 302 8918 
E-mails: [email protected], [email protected] , [email protected] , or [email protected].
For details, see http://www.mdpi.org/lin