My dear colleagues: During recent months of suffering from Springer Verlag's lawsuit regarding the journal MOLECULES (http://mdpi.org/molecules/), I thought a lot and concluded that the internet publication and electronic conference really give all of our scientists' unprecedented freedom of press and we all should love it: Now the technical part of publication is extremely easy and cheap. Every scientists can be a publisher himself. I tell you frankly we published 20 issues of MOLECULES (Vol.2, vol. 3) by ourselves with very easy-to-use software. Before that, publication must be done by a publishing company. Now it is not necessary at all. The only remaining part of publication is peer review of the manuscripts, which has been done exclusively by scientists themselves anyway. My MOLECULES vol.2 and 3 was published not by any publishing company. However, I received more supports and I have more manuscripts than I can publish. The quality (layout, etc.) is very good. This is recognized by the fact that all the major abstracting and indexing services covered my two volumes. Therefore, I believe in near future publishing companies will be vanishing. Long live the Internet!! If they want to survive, the only chance might be to become humble database manager, because Internet makes everything related to information nothing but database.
From my very unfortunate experience with Springer Verlag, I would like to tell all of those dear colleagues who plan to launch a new journal, particularly an internet one, think at lest twice before collaborating with a "famous" professional publisher, it might be predatory one! I also want to use this chance to protest openly against Springer Verlag. I am not used to this kind of thing but I will fight against this injustice. As basically only a poor boy from a remote village in China, I have already luckily enjoyed many, including internet, which I never expected before. Springer: you believe me, I have nothing evil to fear. I believe the principles in the world still exist and the basic human rights of free press will be protected.
I thank many colleagues who encouraged me. Sincerely, Shu-Kun Lin http://www.mdpi.org/lin/ --------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Shu-Kun Lin Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) Saengergasse 25, CH-4054 Basel, Switzerland http://www.mdpi.org/ E-mail lin@mdpi.org Tel. +41 79 322 3379, Fax +41 61 302 8918 -------------------------------------------------------- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)