MDPI

MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access scientific journals headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. Established in 1996, the company operates with a mission to foster open scientific exchange across all disciplines, with its registered office at St. Alban-Anlage 66, Basel.

The organization was originally founded and registered in 1996 as Molecular Diversity Preservation International by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin. In 2010, MDPI AG (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) was founded as an operating company for scientific open access journals by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf.

MDPI's business model centers on broad-discipline, fully open access journals with fast processing times from submission to publication, funded by article processing charges paid by authors. All articles are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license, typically Creative Commons CC BY. As of 2024, the company employed over 6,650 people across 21 offices worldwide and published 238,000 articles in 2024. In 2019, it became the largest open access publisher, moving ahead of Springer Nature.

MDPI journals are included in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the company is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, the Initiative for Open Citations, and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). It also operates related platforms including Sciforum, MDPI Books, Preprints.org, Scilit, SciProfiles, and Encyclopedia. For balance, MDPI has faced industry scrutiny, including being named to Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers in 2014, though independent analysis has attributed its growth largely to its speed- and APC-focused model rather than misconduct. As a high-volume open access publisher, innovations in scholarly publishing, peer review, and research integrity are directly relevant to its operations.