Molecules after 20 years-looking back and looking forward.

Twenty years—a long time—so what happens after 20 years? Well if you live in New Zealand, according to [1], if you are adopted you can apply to Births, Deaths and Marriages for a copy of your birth certificate to find the names of your birth parents, you can apply to adopt a child who is related to you and you can gamble or work in a casino [1], but more seriously, our 20th anniversary is an appropriate time to look back at the history of Molecules and perhaps offer some speculations about its future. To tell the history of Molecules, one must go back to the creation of MDPI in 1995, a little before its first issue appeared. That year Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, the company's current President, who was working at the time at Ciba-Geigy in Basel, Switzerland, conceived the idea of a worldwide center for the collection and sharing of rare chemical samples as a way of preserving chemical diversity for the scientific record. To promote the project, an online journal of synthetic chemistry called Molecules was created and the corresponding ISSN 1420-3049 was obtained. An editorial board was set up with Dr. Lin as Editor-in-Chief and advertisements were published in some of the leading journals of the day to promote the samples collection project [2]. In 1996 Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) was officially founded and registered with the commercial register in Basel in June by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin and Dr. Benoit R. Turin as a non-profit institute. The institute would later become the current publishing house Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute AG (MDPI AG). The samples project still exists—MDPI was dissolved in 2013 and the collection of samples was permanently transferred to the MDPI Sustainability Foundation, on whose behalf the collection is now operated by molMall Sarl [3]. Also in 1996 the scientific peer-reviewed journal Molecules became one of the first electronic chemistry journals when it was launched with a monthly frequency, in collaboration with Springer Verlag. The University of Basel hosted the first homepage for MDPI at www.unibas.ch/mdpi. Later, MDPI would launch its own server and the website was made available at www.mdpi.org. At the end of 1996, Springer Verlag terminated the agreement with MDPI and sought to continue publication of Molecules under its imprint, which led to a lawsuit between MDPI and Springer over ownership of the journal.