We are aware that our current MDPI copyright statement is not in line with the BBB definitions on open access. We are currently smoothly moving to a CC By Attribution License v3.0. Marine Drugs has already been published under that license since January 2008. IJMS and other MDPI journals will start publishing under this license in the May respectively June 2008 issues. All previous content published by MDPI will be released under the CC By license within a couple of months on our new publication platform (now under testing). So this discussion about MDPI and open access will soon be part of history.
Comment. Kudos to MDPI. I'm pleased in part because CC-BY is the most open license short of assignment to the public domain, and in part because this move is independent of last week's launch of the SPARC Europe seal program, which encourages OA journals to adopt CC-BY licenses. The MDPI action arose from its own history of OA and a recent professional discussion of OA in chemistry. The two moves together suggest some convergent momentum for CC-BY licenses at OA journals.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
