We are pleased to welcome more universities from Poland, Italy, Germany, Brazil and other parts of the world to MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). A warm welcome to the institutions listed below, who have joined the Program in February and March this year.

Authors affiliated with these institutions can now enjoy a discount on the APC for papers accepted for publication in any MDPI journal. If you would like to learn more about our program, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap or email us at [email protected].

We are delighted to announce our participation in Jisc’s Publication Router project, as of March 2019.

Publications Router is a Jisc service that automatically sends notifications about research articles to institutions' systems such as their repositories or CRISs, since May 2015. Through this agreement, MDPI will provide Jisc with daily feeds and information regarding published articles, which will be gathered by their system and delivered to institutions also registered to this service. Nearly all of our articles are published within 15 days of acceptance, so institutions will receive them quite promptly.

The feed will include the full text of the published version of record, with no embargo, so the articles can be exposed immediately for public view. They are accompanied by rich metadata, including confirmation of the immediate CC BY licence, minimising the need for any manual intervention or checking.

For more information about Publications Router, you may contact Jisc’s central helpdesk at [email protected]. For any queries about MDPI’s institutional agreements and collaborations, you may get in touch with MDPI’s Institutional Engagement team at [email protected], which would be very happy to hear from further UK institutions.

The editorial office is pleased to announce the winners of the Applied Sciences 2018 Young Investigator Award in “Biosciences and Bioengineering” and “Environmental and Sustainable” Fields.

They have been granted to: Dr. Thanh Duc Nguyen, an assistant Professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut, USA; and Dr. José Marcos Ortega, who is now an Associate Professor in the Civil Engineering Department of the University of Alicante, Spain.

Dr. Thanh Duc Nguyen was nominated by Prof. Cato T. Laurencin (Chief Executive Officer, Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science). Dr. Nguyen is a very impressive and innovative young investigator with outstanding research works focused on biodegradable polymers and technologies of transforming materials into “smart” structures at small scales without compromising their excellent biocompatibility and biodegradability for significant applications in vaccine delivery and medical devices.

Dr. José Marcos Ortega was nominated by the Head of the research group “Durability of materials and constructions in Engineering and Architecture” of the University of Alicante, Professor Miguel Ángel Climent Llorca. Dr. Ortega has continued working in the “Durability of materials and constructions in Engineering and Architecture” research group of the University of Alicante. Recently, he attained a position as an associate professor at the Civil Engineering Department of the University of Alicante, where he is also the secretary of the PhD program “Materials, Structures and Soil Engineering: Sustainable Construction”.

It was a difficult decision with such high-quality applications for the awards, and we would like to thank all applicants for submitting their diverse and fascinating range of research topics. On behalf of the assessment committee, we congratulate the winners for their accomplishments. We are proud to support these young scientists and wish them further success in their careers.

The editorial office would like to announce the winners of the Applied Sciences Travel Awards in Nanosciences and Optics fields for 2019.

They have been granted to: Dr. Giuseppe Cavallaro from the University of Palermo, who has demonstrated mobility in the field of Nanotechnology and Applied Nanosciences; and Dr. Juan Sebastian Totero Gongora, a Helena Normanton Research Fellow in Quantum Technology, University of Sussex, United Kingdom.

It was a difficult decision with such high-quality applications for the awards, and we would like to thank all applicants for submitting their diverse and fascinating range of research topics. On behalf of the assessment committee, I congratulate the winners for their accomplishments. We are proud to support these young scientists and wish them further success in their careers.

Dr. Juan Sebastian Totero Gongora, winner in Optics field (left); Dr. Giuseppe Cavallaro, winner in Nanosciences field (right).

Rigorous peer-review is the cornerstone of high quality academic publishing. Over 97,000 scholars served as reviewers for MDPI journals in 2018. We are extremely appreciative of all those who made a contribution to the editorial process in this capacity. At the beginning of every year, journal editorial offices publish a list all reviewers’ names to express our gratitude. In addition, this year the “MDPI Top Reviewer Awards” are announced, to recognize the very best reviewers for their expertise, dedication, high quality, and timely review reports. We are pleased to announce the following winners of the 2018 MDPI Top Reviewer Awards:

• Ali Behnood
• Andrea Pezzuolo
• Angela Gorgoglione
• Anna D'Auria
• Antonio D'Andrea
• Azhar Abbas
• Bogdan Zagajewski
• Chunhui Chen
• Dominika Głąbska
• Dominika Guzek
• Dragan Pamucar
• Francisco J. G. Silva
• Frank Li
• Gianluca Serafini
• Gyorgy Szekely
• Haozhi Pan
• Helvi Heinonen-Tanski
• José Manuel Gómez-Soberón
• Kathy Lewis
• Klara Kosova
• Luis N. López De Lacalle
• M. Z. Naser
• Malwina Tytła
• Masoume Amirkhani
• Matteo Ghidelli
• Moretti Laura
• Petra Schneider
• Roberto Cerchione
• Spyros Papaefthymiou
• Ştefan Cristian Gherghina

Since 2010, MDPI has run its own online submission system. More recently, we have made the software, with accompanying publishing services, available to other publishers as JAMS (Journal and Article Management System). We are now delighted to announce the launch of JAMS Journals, a standardized platform for operating open access journals at low cost.

JAMS Journals provides a comprehensive service, including a shared submission website, journal websites hosted at a URL provided by the publisher, and a full production service. There is a small setup fee and the cost for each published paper is just a few hundred Swiss francs.

The platform demonstrates that running an open access journal can be straightforward and affordable. The JAMS Journals platform is suitable for

• small publishers or groups of scholars looking to launch their own journal;
• existing publishers or societies seeking to explore open access options;
• publishers looking to convert an existing subscription journal to open access.

JAMS journals launches with two journals from Canadian-based publisher Etcetera Publications:

• Canadian Journal of Pesticides & Pest Management (http://www.cjppm.ca)
• Nanotechnology in Agriculture, Food & Environment (http://www.nanoafe.ca)

Dr AJ Al-Rajab (President of Etcetera Publications) comments:

“In the past few months, we were working on our project to launch new open access scientific journals in the field of agricultural and environmental sciences. We decided to go with JAMS for this venture because of the high quality of their services, reasonable prices, professionalism and easy communication. Our portfolio is expected to grow rapidly during 2019 to include more titles covering different areas in agriculture and environment. MDPI earned already our complete satisfaction and we are looking for a long term cooperation.”

Alongside the new platform, we continue to provide flexible, tailored journal management solutions for existing publishers. For any questions or to request a quotation, contact Martyn Rittman ([email protected])

2018 was a great year for preprints, with increasing numbers of authors looking to make their papers available online before peer review. Along with other preprint servers, our platform Preprints.org  saw an increase in the uptake from authors, and more than double the number of announced papers compared to 2017. In fact, we recently passed two important milestones: 8000 preprints online and 30,000 authors. 

We believe that the whole research community has the opportunity to benefit from work being available online as early as possible. We thank and congratulate our authors for supporting us to make this goal a reality.

In 2019, we will be looking carefully at how to provide better value for authors, maintain efficiency while growing in size, and make sure we remain well-connected with the research community. 

If you want to participate, you can consider screening preprints or joining our advisory board. And, of course, posting your own work.

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our national Open Access agreement with the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Through this national agreement, the Austrian institutions listed below as well as FWF will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by eligible corresponding or funded authors in MDPI journals as long as central funds are available.

All participating institutions have gained access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Funder and Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency. At the same time eligible authors are benefited from an APC discount which comes at no cost for the institutions.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with the participating institutions are prompted to choose the corresponding Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email address. To claim their discount, FWF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript. The institutions will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Eligible authors that have their APC covered by their institution or funder are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "Open Access Funding by the [name of the institution/funder]".

The full text of the agreement is openly available online at: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2536007

For any questions about the agreement, please contact the KEMÖ Consortium at [email protected], FWF at [email protected], or the MDPI IOAP team at [email protected]

The Austrian institutions participating in this agreement are:

• Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
• University for Continuing Education Krems
• University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna
• University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien
• Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
• Institute of Science and Technology Austria
• MCI Management Center Innsbruck
• University of Graz
• University of Linz
• University of Salzburg
• Graz University of Technology
• TU Wien
• University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna
• University of Vienna

This is our first collective agreement with a national library consortium, while the individual institutions around the world participating in our IOAP are now more than 500 - see details here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap. We would be mostly interested in discussing about possible collaborations with other consortia, funders, and institutions in our mutual efforts to accelerate Open Access.

We are pleased to announce the new platform Encyclopedia, which is an online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as providing benchmark information for researchers and the general public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge on specific topics.

We encourage authors of review articles to quote and adapt the content of their published papers to create Encyclopedia entries. You can create completely new entries on topics in which you have knowledge and expertise. There is no limit on the topics or research fields. All of science and the humanities are included. Each entry will be published directly after submission.

We also have prepared a DOI application function in Encyclopedia. Once a DOI application is approved, the entry website will announce the DOI number and a pdf version with DOI information will be automatically created.

We look forward to your contributions and hope you will make use of this service. Find more about the service at: https://encyclopedia.pub/

We will attend the 32nd International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS 2019). It will be held in Seoul, Korea, 27–31 January 2019, and it will be organized by the society of Micro and Nano Systems (SMNS). MEMS 2019 is one of the premier annual events reporting research results on every aspect of microsystems technology. This conference reflects from the rapid proliferation of the commitment and success of the microsystems research community. In recent years, the IEEE MEMS Conference has attracted more than 700 participants and 800+ abstract submissions and has created a forum to present over 200 select papers in podium and poster/oral sessions. Representatives of the following open-access journals will attend:

Micromachines

Technologies

Chemosensors

Energies

Applied Sciences

Sensors

Fluids

J – Journal of Multidisciplinary Science

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (booth #40). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit http://mems19.org/html/main.php.

Our colleagues and editors will be attending the TMS 2019 Annual Meeting and Exhibition, to be held in San Antonio, TX, USA, 10–14 March 2019. The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Metals

Materials

Coatings

Applied Sciences

Nanomaterials

Micromachines

Journal of Composites Science

Energies

QuBS

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#137). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions you may have.

Our editors and colleagues are attending the 22nd International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences (µTAS 2018). The conference is being held at the Kaohsiung Exhibition Center in Kaohsiung, Taiwan from 11 to 15 November 2018, organized by the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society (CBMS).

µTAS 2018 continues a series of Conferences that are the premier forum for reporting research results in microfluidics, microfabrication, nanotechnology, integration, materials and surfaces, analysis and synthesis, and detection technologies for life science and chemistry. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Micromachines

Applied Sciences

International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS)

Sensors

Biosensors

Technologies

Diagnostics

Journal of Multidisciplinary Science (J)

If you're attending the conference too, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #350). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://cbmsociety.org/conferences/microtas2018/

We are delighted to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now a participant of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). Authors funded by the BMGF can enjoy discounts on the APC, while the funder covers the costs of eligible articles centrally. BMGF also has access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency.

We hope that funded authors find the programme beneficial and we are happy to offer our IOAP to other funders that need a streamlined workflow of compliance checking and APC coverage. 

To claim their discount, BMGF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript.

For any questions about the BMGF agreement, please contact the funder at [email protected] or the MDPI IOAP team at [email protected].

We congratulate Donna Strickland (University of Waterloo, Canada) on receiving the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with fellow physicist Gérard Mourou, for inventing a method for generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses which can be utilized in a variety of applications in science and technology (e.g., advanced material 3D micro-/nano-processing and micro-machining).

One of Dr. Donna Strickland's studies was published in Applied Sciences: Effect of Two-Photon Stark Shift on the Multi-Frequency Raman Spectra Appl. Sci. 2014, 4(3), 390–401. The paper described how linear Raman scattering from two-photon dressed states can lead to the generation of these extra peaks on the low-frequency side of the Raman orders.

The MRG spectra are shown for two positively chirped pump pulses, with total energy of 1.5 mJ as a function of time delay between the two pulses (figure adapted from Appl. Sci. 2014, 4(3), 390–401).

Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.

We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.

We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".

For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at [email protected].

Our editorial team will be attending the XXVI Ibero-American Catalysis Congress (CICat 2018) in Coimbra, Portugal, 9–14 September 2018

As a result of the biannual meetings held since 1968, the Ibero-American Federation of Catalysis Societies (FISoCat), the Portuguese Society of Chemistry (SPQ) and the University of Coimbra, have the pleasure of organizing the XXVI Ibero-American Catalysis Congress (CICat 2018).

As in previous editions, this event aims to be a meeting point for the Ibero-American community working in Catalysis and in all its different areas of scientific knowledge. The 2018 CICat has a symbolic historical importance, for reaching 50 years since the beginning of this series of Encounters. Participants of CICat 2018 are also invited to visit the city of Coimbra, as well as its historic center and the University of Coimbra (UNESCO World Heritage Site).

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Catalysts
Processes
Energies
Symmetry
Applied Sciences
Sustainability
Materials

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth near the Lobby Coffee Break). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://cicat2018.eventos.chemistry.pt/?setLn=es.

We are pleased to inform that Applied Sciences received an updated Journal Impact Factor of 1.689 in the June 2018 release of the Journal Citation Reports®. The journal's 5-Year Impact Factor is 1.855. Applied Sciences now ranks 170/285 (Q3) in the category 'Materials Science, Multidisciplinary', 98/171 (Q3) in 'Chemistry, Multidisciplinary' and 77/146 (Q3) in 'Applied Physics.'

Overview of Citation Metrics:

• Journal Impact Factor, 2 yrs (2017): 1.689
• 5-Year Impact Factor (2017):  1.855
• CiteScore, 3 yrs (Scopus):  1.90
• SJR Scimago Journal Rank 2017 (SJR):  0.303
• Source Normalized Impact 2017 (SNIP):  0.801

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Applied Sciences:

We are pleased to report Applied Sciences received a CiteScore of 1.90 for 2017. The metric reflects citation activity in 2017 in Scopus for papers published in the period 2014‒2016.

For the full details in the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile. To check the full list of MDPI journals receiving CiteScores, please see here.

The 2017 CiteScore™ data is available now, based on citation data in the Scopus® database. The current CiteScore reflects citation activity in 2017 for articles published in 2014‒2016. Please note that the list below includes journals assigned a CiteScore in this year’s release. For a full list of journals indexed in Scopus, please see our journal list.

Thirteen of our journals received a CiteScore which is in the top 10% of the distribution in at least one of the categories (marked with * in the table below), while a further 32 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

Unlike CiteScores and the widely used Journal Impact Factors, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metrics are normalized in order to correct for differences in citation practices between scientific fields. Therefore, the SNIP allows direct comparison between journals specialized in different fields.

According to 2017 data, MDPI publishes six journals with an average citation impact, or SNIP, in excess of 1.500. These journals are Biomolecules, Cancers, Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM), Marine Drugs, Remote Sensing and Sensors (see the last column in the table below).

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

MDPI will be attending the 69th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Electrochemistry, to be held in Bologna, Italy, 2–7 September 2018.

To mark the continuity between academic culture and technological progress, the scientific theme of the meeting is Electrochemistry from Knowledge to Innovation. Fundamental aspects of analytical, molecular, physical and bioelectrochemistry will be discussed, as well as their applications to (nano)materials science, energy, environment and biomedicine.

The following MDPI journals will be represented at the Meeting:

• Coatings
• Metals
• Applied Science
• Catalysts
• Materials
• Chemosensors
• Biosensors

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #9). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://annual69.ise-online.org/.

We are pleased to announce the results of the first MDPI Writing Prize. We received a large number of entries from across the globe on the theme of “The Global Benefits of Open Research”. It was a pleasure to read so many original, well-researched and well-presented ideas, and the final choice was not an easy one. We are pleased to announce that the winners are as follows:

1st prize (500 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Edmond Sanganyado, Shantou University, China

2nd prizes (250 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Kamala T. Rajahgopal, Asia e University, Malaysia
Yin Zhixuan, Qingdao University of Technology, China

3rd prizes (100 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Alexandra Ticea, Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania
Ankur Sarker, University of Virginia, USA
Daniel Attoye, United Arab Emirates University, UAE

Congratulations to all of them! The winning entries can be downloaded by clicking on the names above. A compilation of all entries will soon be available as an open access book.

The writing prize is sponsored by the MDPI English editing service.

At MDPI, we always want to keep you up to date. Even for already published articles, some corrections or minor changes may occur. To prevent you from missing any updates, from now on you will be able to access the latest version of any manuscript by clicking on the “check for updates” logo that you can find in the PDF file, even if you have saved the file on your computer.

We are proud to announce that MDPI is now a member of UKSG, the UK´s largest scholarly communications community. Through UKSG, different stakeholders share their knowledge and experience in order to improve the knowledge and information environment for researchers. UKSG´s members include universities, publishers, content providers, intermediaries, and other similar organisations. Members participate in discussions and events on issues around scholarly communications.

The UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition is a flagship initiative from the UKSG and one of the most stimulating events in the scholarly communications calendar. It is held annually and attracts a large number of delegates. More information is available at https://www.uksg.org/events/annualconference

MDPI is delighted to be a part of this active community and we look forward to making our own contribution. We will continue to support organisations and initiatives that boost collaboration and vision within scholarly communication.

More information about UKSG can be found at https://www.uksg.org/. The full membership list is available at: https://www.uksg.org/members.

MDPI will be attending the 2018 E-MRS Spring Meeting and Exhibit. The conference is a plenary session to provide an international forum for discussing recent advances in the field of materials science. It will consist of 29 parallel symposia with invited speakers, oral and poster presentations. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Applied Sciences
Biomimetics
Clean Technologies
Coatings
Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing (JMMP)
Materials
Metals
Nanomaterials
Polymers
Processes
Quantum Beam Science (QuBS)

We will be attending the 20th annual Nanotech 2018 Conference & Expo (NANOTECH 2018), co-located with the TechConnect World Innovation Conference, Defense TechConnect Summit and Spring SBIR/STTR Conference. The event will attract more than 350 featured exhibitors and an expected crowd of more than 4000 attendees, including business executives, venture capitalists, politicians, s cientists and researchers from over 70 countries. Nanotech contains 38 symposiums and brings together specialists from a wide range of scientific fields, technology and business.

Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Sensors
Materials
Nanomaterials
Journal of Functional Biomaterials (JFB)
Journal of Imaging
Sustainability
Fluids
Photonics
Electronics
Catalysts
Applied Sciences
Inventions
Diagnostics
Cancers
Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications (JLPEA)
Designs
Pharmaceuticals
C
Inorganics
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH)
Machines
Pharmaceutics
Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing (JMMP)
Actuators
Robotics
Energies
Biosensors
Chemosensors
Membranes
Coatings
Micromachines

If you will also attend this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth # 317). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit:

https://www.techconnectworld.com/Nanotech2018/

Conference Location:
Anaheim Convention Center,
800 W Katella Avenue
Anaheim CA 92802
USA

The DORA initiative addresses the need for advanced approaches in the evaluation and measurement of the quality of scientific research outputs. It is a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines. MDPI proudly joins a list of more than 400 organizations around the world which support DORA’s recommendations for improving the way the quality of research results is evaluated.

More info can be found at http://www.ascb.org/dora/

We will be attending the 255th ACS National Meeting & Exposition. It is an interdisciplinary forum open to anyone with an interest in Chemistry and the related disciplines. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Agronomy
Applied Sciences
Beverages
Biomimetics
Biosensors
C
Catalysts
ChemEngineering
Chemosensors
Coatings
Energies
Environments
Fibers
Foods
Gels
Inorganics
Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (JMSE)
Lubricants
Materials
Mathematics
Metals
Molecules
Nanomaterials
Polymers
Processes
Resources
Safety
Sensors
Separations
Sustainability
Symmetry
Toxins
Water

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #640). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/meetings/national-meeting.html?sc=home_meetings_170818_mtg_NO18_od

Sensors are vital components of smart manufacturing, artificial Intelligence, Cyber–Physical System (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) for industry 4.0. For more advanced creations, biologists, engineers, physicists and chemists are all endeavoring to provide innovative technical sensors. In 2018, the journal Sensors is going to hold an international conference in Kenting, which is located in the south of Taiwan; the conference is taking place in Asia for the first time.

I3S embraces all professionals from industry, academia and government to discuss the latest developments and breakthroughs of sensor technology and related subjects. During the conference, attendees, from a range of research areas, will all gather together to share different aspects and establish new mutually beneficial collaborations across different fields.

Conference scope: Physical Sensors; Sensor Networks; Sensors Application; Biosensors; Chemical Sensors; IOT sensor and application.

We sincerely look forward to your participation in I3S2018.

The competition is still open until end of March! Please check out the banner for more details: https://img.mdpi.org/data/english-prize.pdf

We are delighted to announce that UCL Press has adopted MDPI's Journal Article & Management System, JAMS, including production services. JAMS is a modular, integrated editorial platform for academic publishers. It offers flexibility, ease-of-use, and is a fully integrated solution for the end-to-end management of scholarly journals. JAMS is based on the software used to publish MDPI’s portfolio of journals. 

Ian Caswell, UCL Press Journals Manager, says he is "excited to see UCL Press and MDPI partner together to implement the JAMS submission system for all UCL Press journals. The system offered a flexible, efficient and straightforward solution for our processes from author submission to ready for publication. I am grateful for the valuable experience and support MDPI have offered and look forward to developing our programme with an effective submission system in place.” Dr Martyn Rittman, MDPI’s Publishing Services Manager, adds, “We are proud to support one of the UK’s premier university presses in their publishing operation. This is an excellent way for us at MDPI to share our experience and knowledge, and benefit the research community beyond our own journals.”

JAMS combines services that are kept separate for many publishers. The entire editorial process, production and invoicing (e.g. for open access article processing charges) are fully integrated into a single platform. This allows for efficient, fast manuscript processing. For further information about JAMS, see https://www.mdpi.com/publishing_services. 

We will be attending the 147th TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition, which will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, March 11–15, 2018, representing the following open access journals:

Metals
Materials
Coatings
Applied Sciences
Energies
Minerals
Fibers
JFB

Please come along to our booth (#322) to talk with our delegates about online publishing and our journals. We look forward to meeting you in person in Phoenix!

For more information on the conference, please visit:
http://www.tms.org/tms2018

We are pleased to welcome new participants to MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP), designed to help institutions manage the transition to the Open Access publishing model. Researchers affiliated with participating universites benefit from a 10% discount on the Article Processing Charges (APC) for any paper published in an MDPI journal, while the participating library or university incurs no basic fee for participating in the program.

• No fee for participants and no obligation to prolong after the initial 12 months. The participants may withdraw from the programme at any time, and we will also keep it free for the library for as long as they continue in the programme.
• Authors affiliated with the university will receive a 10% discount on the APC.
• The institution is granted free access to the MDPI submission system and can receive free alerts of new submissions to our journals.
• By default, authors from the institution will continue to be invoiced directly unless the institution opts for central billing.
• Auto-archiving of papers into the institutions´ repository as long as it supports SWORD 1.3.

More details about the programme and a list of our current participant institutions can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap

Institutions which are interested to participate may do so online at: https://www.mdpi.com/ioap-form

The following North American universities have signed up to the IOAP program recently:

Connecticut College, USA
Emory University, USA
Florida International University, USA
Johns Hopkins University, USA
Mississippi State University, USA
Northeastern University, USA
Rice University, USA
University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada
University of Rhode Island, USA
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA
University of Toronto, Canada
University of Windsor, Canada
University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Wellesley College, USA
West Virginia University, USA

Many prestigious institutions from Europe and Asia have joined as well:

Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation, Malaysia
Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Gdansk University of Technology, Poland
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan
Newcastle University, UK
Northumbria University, UK
Southwest University, China
Technical University of Crete, Greece
University Malaya, Malaysia
University of Antwerp, Belgium
University of Cyprus, Cyprus
University of Manchester, UK
University of Reading, UK
University of Sussex, UK
University of Warwick, UK
West Pomeranian University of Technology Szczecin, Poland

We offer a warm welcome to the new participants!

In order to reward the academic community, especially young researchers, and enhance communication among scientists, MDPI journals regularly offer various awards to researchers in specific fields, for example, Young Investigator Awards, Travel Awards, Best Paper Awards, and Best Poster Awards, etc. The awardees range from PhD students to junior scientists.

Currently, the following 44 awards given by MDPI journals are accepting applications. Please click on the award title below to check whether you are eligible for it and start the application process.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Andrea Prati has been appointed as Section Editor-in-Chief of “Computer Science and Electrical Engineering” in Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). His term started at the beginning of November 2017.

Andrea Prati graduated with honors in Computer Engineering in 1998 and received his PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2001. He was a visiting scholar for 9 months at the University of California, San Diego in 2001. From 2005 to 2011, he was a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. In 2013, he was promoted to full professorship.

His research interests encompass different themes, from embedded devices for sensor networks in computer vision applications, to robotic vision, to multimedia, to performance analysis for multimedia computers. However, his main research activity is in video-surveillance topics: object tracking in distributed, multi-camera environments; analysis and removal of shadows; behavior analysis through trajectory classification. He recently started to research mobile vision, i.e., the application of sophisticated computer vision techniques on mobile phones.

He is the author of more than 150 papers, including 30 journals and five book chapters (list of publications can be found here. He has been an invited speaker and reviewer for many international journals. He is also Area Editor of Elsevier CVIU journal, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Eurasip JIVP, SPIE Optical Engineering and IOS Press JAISE. In 2017, he was appointed as Section Editor-in-Chief for the Section “Computer Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering” for Applied Sciences.

He has also organized several Special Issues in international journals. He was the PC of ICIAP 2007. He was the PC of ACM/IEEE ICDSC in 2011, 2012, and 2013 and General Chair for the 2014 edition in Venice, Italy. He was also the local chair for International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2017, a leading conference in computer vision with more than 3200 attendees. He is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM and GIRPR, and fellow of IAPR.

We would like to warmly welcome Professor Andrea Prati as Section Editor-in-Chief and look forward to developing the Section “Computer Science and Electrical Engineering” under his leadership.

The Jussieu Call aims to develop and implement alternative models to meet the aims of open science while promoting bibliodiversity. In particular it wishes to promote new business models for funding open access publication. It was drafted on the Jussieu campus in Paris by a group of French researchers and scientific publishing professionals.

MDPI supports scholarly communities and initiatives that innovate and further promote Open Access publishing. There is a need to explore different frameworks to fund open access in ways that ensure that excessive funds are not diverted from research towards publishing. Many fair funding models already exist, and they can be further developed and extended. These include institutional support, library contributions or subsidies, premium services, participatory funding, etc. For this reason, MDPI has signed up to the Jussieu call and welcomes its aims.

More information can be found at http://jussieucall.org/

The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s popular blog about topics in academic publishing, Scholarly Kitchen, recently interviewed MDPI’s CEO, Dr. Franck Vazquez. He shared some thoughts and information on the past and future of MDPI and open access publishing in general:

“In the long run, we aim to anchor MDPI in research communities. We recently developed and launched the preprint platform Preprints, revamped our free-to-use conference hosting platform Sciforum, and are working on other projects, such as Scilit, our bibliographic database.”

Read the full interview here.

We will be attending the MicroTAS 2017, a series of Conferences that are the premier forum for reporting research results in microfluidics, microfabrication, nanotechnology, integration, materials and surfaces, analysis and synthesis, and detection technologies for life science and chemistry. It will be held at the Savannah International Trade and Conference Center in Savannah, Georgia, USA from October 22–26, 2017, representing the following MDPI open access journals:

Micromachines
Sensors
Diagnostics
Biosensors
Technologies
Applied Sciences

Please visit our stand ((booth number: #6) to chat about our journals with our delegates. We look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.microtas2017.org.

Conference Location

Savannah International Trade & Convention Center
1 International Drive
Savannah, Georgia 31402
USA

Once over 10 papers are received for this Special Issue, one of the published papers will be selected to receive a SI Best Paper Award by an Evaluation Committee.

Criteria:

From papers submitted to this Special Issue, the award nominees will be assessed on their originality, quality, and contribution to the field.

Award:

A SI Best paper Award consisting of 300 CHF, a certificate and the opportunity to publish one’s next submission free of charge in Applied Sciences will be given to the authors of the winning best paper of the Special Issue.

We will be attending the 2017 MRS Fall Meeting which will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from November 26–December 1, 2017, and representing the following open access journals:

Materials
Nanomaterials
Energies
Metals
Applied Sciences
Crystals
Minerals
Journal of Functional Biomaterials
Coatings
Robotics
Biosensors
Chemosensors
Polymers
Bioengineering

Please come along to our booth (booth number: #122) to chat with our delegates about our journals and hear about our travel awards offered to Postdocs and PhD students. Our delegates will also answer any questions about online publishing and our journals. We look forward to meeting you in person in Boston!

For more information on the conference, please visit:
www.mrs.org/fall2017

We are delighted to have welcomed 24 new participants to our Institutional Open Access Programme (IOAP) since the beginning of September this year. These are University libraries and Research Institutions located around the world; from the USA and Canada to the UK, and from Norway and Spain to Greece. Well respected Universities, such as the University of Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Arizona in the US, have signed up, while their researchers can now benefit from a 10% discount on the Article Processing Charges (APC) for any papers they publish in MDPI journals, at no cost for the library or the University.

We are more than happy to see the Open Access movement growing stronger and wider every day and we appreciate the vital role which librarians, repository managers, and other scholarly communications professionals play in the field. Our communication with and service to this community is, therefore, one of our principal priorities. The IOAP is our way to support academic and scientific Institutions as well as their scholars in managing, administrating, and publishing research in an Open Access world.

The IOAP set of free services, provided by MDPI to institutions that sign up, include:

• No fee for participants and no obligation to prolong after the initial 12 months. The participants may withdraw from the programme at any time, and we will also keep it free for the library for as long as they continue in the programme.
• Authors affiliated with the university will receive a 10% discount on the APC.
• The institution is granted free access to the MDPI submission system and can receive free alerts of new submissions to our journals.
• By default, authors from the institution will continue to be invoiced directly unless the institution opts for central billing.
• Auto-archiving of papers into the institutions´ repository as long as it supports SWORD 1.3.

More details about the programme and a list of our current participant institutions can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap

Institutions which are interested to participate may do so online at: https://www.mdpi.com/ioap-form

 The full list of the Institutions that signed up in September is as follows:

1. University of Denver, USA
2. University of Colorado Boulder, USA
3. University of Arizona, USA
4. Institute of Metrology of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina
5. Middlebury College, USA
6. Touro College, USA
7. University of New Orleans, USA
8. University of Leicester, UK
9. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, USA
10. University of Strathclyde, UK
11. Cranfield University, UK
12. Hope College, USA
13. Oregon State University, USA
14. Drew University, USA
15. Swansea University, UK
16. University of South Florida, USA
17. University of Georgia, USA
18. Arizona State University, USA
19. University of Southern Mississippi, USA
20. Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada
21. Grinnell College, USA
22. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
23. University of Patras, Greece
24. Public University of Navarre, Spain

Congratulations to the authors Javier Monroy and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez from Universidad de Malaga, Spain, Victor Hernandez-Bennets, Han Fan and Achim Lilienthal from Örebro University, Sweden for publishing the 100,000th peer-reviewed article.

The article is published in the Chemical Sensors section of Sensors.

GADEN: A 3D Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments

Evermore pressing environmental concerns have led global actors and decision-makers to search for stricter emission monitoring approaches. As part of novel monitoring systems, robots with gas and environmental sensors are a promising solution. However, validation of such robotic inspectors is expensive, time consuming, and plagued by repeatability issues. In this article, we present GADEN (the short form for Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments), which combines gas dispersion and robotics simulation in a common framework. Developed under the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS), GADEN enables validation of sensing strategies with gas dispersion being simulated using computational fluid dynamics and filament dispersion theory. GADEN allows simulating complex, realistic, 3D environments for reproducible testing of robotic gas sensing algorithms. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we show that GADEN is a versatile and user-friendly evaluation tool and emphasize its enormous potential for the mobile robot olfaction community.

Read the full article here: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/7/1479/htm

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Applied Sciences:

We will be attending the World of Photonic Congress 2017, which takes place June 25-29, 2017, representing the following open access journals:

Applied Sciences
Materials
Technologies
Photonics
Micromachines

Please come along to our stand, to have a chat about our journals with our delegates about our journals andor to learn more about our travel awards that offered to Postdocs and PhD students by the representeding journals offering to Postdocs and PhD students.

Conference address:
World of Photonic Congress 2017
International Congress Center, Munich, Germany

Conference date:
June 25–-29 2017

For more information on the conference, please visit:
http://www.cleoeurope.org/world-of-photonics-congress

The CiteScore, the new citation metric for journals covered in the Scopus® database, was released on 1 June 2017, reflecting the citation activity in 2016 for articles published during the three previous years. Please note that the list below does not contain all MDPI journals covered in Scopus. For the CiteScore to serve as a reliable metric at least three volumes of articles need to be indexed in Scopus; journals which have not met this criterion have been omitted here.

Ten MDPI journals received a CiteScore which is in the Top 10% of scores in at least one of the categories, while a further 21 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

We will be attending the 25th North American Meeting (NAM) of the Catalysis Society, which takes place June 4-9, 2017, representing the following open access journals:

Catalysts

Metals

Nanomaterials

Molecules

Energies

Sustainability

Applied Sciences

Coatings

Magnetochemistry

Processes

C

Please come along to our stand, booth number #211, to talk to our delegates about our journals and travel awards you could apply. We also would like to invite you to our ‘Meet and Greet’ session at 12:00 pm on 7th June! Catalysts Professor Keith Hohn, the Editor-in-Chief of Catalysts, and the Editorial Board Member Professor Calvin Bartholomew will be there to answer your questions about the Open Access publishing.

Food and refreshments will be provided and we look forward to meeting you in person to answer your questions.

Conference address:

MDPI booth - number #211

25th North American Meeting of the Catalysis Society

June 4-9, 2017

Hyatt Regency Hotel and Convention Center, Denver, Colorado, USA

For more information on the conference, please visit
http://www.nam25.org/

We are pleased to announce that the Goethe University of Frankfurt, the Technical University of Hamburg (TU Hamburg-Harburg), as well as the Humboldt University of Berlin, in Germany, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce the Featured Journal of this Month— Nanomaterials.

Nanomaterials is an Open Access Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Journal, published monthly by MDPI. Since it was founded in 2011, 598 articles have been published, 65 of them cited 10 times or more (h-10 index). The current Impact Factor is 2.690, and the five-year impact factor is 3.176.

For more information, also check out our special issues, currently open for submissions and our MDPI-Blog.

As an open access publisher, we are keen to support openness and transparency in the research process. Citation data is very important for assessing the value of individual papers and the contribution of researchers. As such, we support the recently launched Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). The initiative recognizes that citations should be freely available and machine-readable. By doing so, authors gain the maximum benefit from having their work cited.

MDPI now uploads citation data with metadata uploaded to Crossref when registering digital object identifiers (DOIs) for published papers. We are delighted to take this step to support a truly open research environment.

Getting high quality review reports is critical for any journal’s editorial process. At MDPI we have put in place several measures to motivate reviewers and reward them for their work. We are proud of the quality of reviewer reports we receive and grateful for the hours put in by active researchers from across the globe.

Reviewers of MDPI’s largest journals can get recognition via Publons, a website dedicated to rewarding peer reviewers. They have now taken this one step further and launched the Publons Reviewer Academy to help train reviewers to provide useful feedback. Through the academy, researchers can be trained and tutored in various aspects of how to provide structured feedback that will be of genuine help to editors and authors. We support this initiative and recommend it to potential MDPI reviewers, especially early career researchers. See the Publons announcement for further information.

More information on reviewing for MDPI, including how to volunteer as a reviewer, can be found here.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA and the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

Preprints.org is a platform run by MDPI that allows authors to make early versions of manuscripts available before peer review has been completed.

One of the major benefits of putting a preprint online is to get feedback before journal submission. Until now, however, the feedback has been on a voluntary basis. Preprints is delighted to be the first preprint server to collaborate with Publons to acknowledge substantial comments as reviews and give commentators the opportunity to receive credit for their efforts. 

When you add a comment to any article, there is a check box to click for it to appear on Publons. If you have already linked your account it will be passed on automatically. If you don't already have a Publons account, you will be contacted soon afterwards with instructions on how to create one.

We appreciate the enthusiasm and cooperation of Publons in this project and expect it to be of great benefit to authors and commenters alike.

We are pleased to announce that our annual report for the year 2016 has now been published. 

It contains information regarding company and journal performance, conferences and other publishing services that we provided throughout 2016. 

To read the report in full or download a copy, please click here.

MDPI will be attending the 253rd American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition, which takes place 2–6 April 2017, representing the following open access journals:

Molecules
Materials
Energies
Nanomaterials
Catalysts
Applied Sciences
Batteries
Coatings
Metals 
Magnetochemistry
Marine Drugs
Processes
Pharmaceuticals
Symmetry

If you are planning to attend, please visit our booth (Number 1618) to talk to our delegates about our journals and open access publishing. Also feel free to attend our ‘Meet and Greet’ session at 12:30pm on 3 April with Dr. Derek J. McPhee, the Editor-in-Chief of our journal Molecules. Food and refreshments will be provided.  

Conference address:

MDPI - Booth 1618
253rd American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition
The Moscone Center, 747 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
USA

After the 20th anniversary of MDPI in 2016, we will reach another milestone this year and will publish the 100,000th peer-reviewed article in one of our 170+ open access journals.

We would like you to be part of this great achievement and so are offering to publish the 100,000th accepted paper free of charge.

To be in with a chance, select a journal in one of our 10 scientific subject areas and submit your paper.

Access the live tracker on published articles here.

We are delighted that Preprints now has 1000 papers online since its launch on 3 May 2016.

For more information, see the editorial here.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Samuel B. Adeloju has been appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the Applied Chemistry Section of the Applied Sciences journal  (ISSN 2076-3417). His appointment started in January 2017.

Sam Adeloju is a Professor of Chemistry at the Monash University (Australia) and a Visiting Professor of Sensors and Analytical Chemistry at the University of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). Prof. Adeloju is an internationally recognised expert in biosensing technology, nanotechnology, analytical spectrometry, electroanalytical and environmental chemistry. He has published numerous papers in journals and books, speaking regularly at international conferences and conventions.

Prof. Adeloju’s research has earned him regular recognition both nationally and internationally. He was awarded the 2009 Applied Research Medal by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) for outstanding contributions to the development of Applied Chemistry research in Australia from 1999–2009, particularly in biosensors, nanotechnology and analytical spectrometry. He was also the recipient of the 2011 Stokes Medal from the Electrochemistry Division of RACI for distinguished contributions to electrochemistry in Australia and the winner of the 2013 Doreen Clark Medal from the Analytical and Environmental Chemistry Division of RACI for outstanding contributions to Analytical Chemistry in Australia. He is also currently the Chairman of the RACI Management Committee of the monthly published Chemistry in Australia magazine.

We would like to warmly welcome Professor Adeloju as Editor-in-Chief and look forward to his support in the continued success of the Applied Chemistry Section of the Applied Sciences journal.

Earlier this week the Science Technology Park in Belgrade, Serbia was visited by Swiss Secretary of State Dr. Mauro Dell’Ambrogio, as well as Serbian Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government Ana Brnabic, State Secretary Dr. Vladimir Popovic and Mayor of Belgrade Mr. Siniša Mali.

During the visit to the STP they had a short presentation from MDPI’s CEO Dr. Franck Vazquez and IT Manager Mr. Miloš Čučulović, and further discussed important issues such as Open Access and Open education. Dr. Dell'Ambrogio said he was impressed with the potential for development and ideas for business.

For more information please see:

http://bit.ly/2kpIu7k and http://bit.ly/2kpUQfz

We are pleased to announce that the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, the University of Manitoba, Canada and the Technical University of Cartagena, Spain, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

The 6^th World Sustainability Forum is currently being held at the Cape Sun Hotel until 28 January 2017. 

The Forum will showcase the work of internationally renowned researchers and include more than 150 presentations. During the conference dinner, the World Sustainability Award, associated with a US$ 100,000 prize, will be announced, as well as the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award, associated with a US$ 10,000 prize. The prizes are sponsored by the MDPI Sustainability Foundation and Sustainability, an academic open access journal by MDPI.

Here are some pictures from the forum so far:

To see the full WSF2017 program and schedule, please see here: http://sciforum.net/conference/wsf-6/page/schedule

Cape Town will host the 6^th World Sustainability Forum at the Cape Sun Hotel on 27 and 28 January 2017. This prominent event, held for the first time in Africa, will include many illustrious South African and international experts, such as Her Excellency Graça Machel (Sustainable Development Advocate for the United Nations, Mozambique), Joyene Isaacs (HoD Agriculture Western Cape Government), Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University, USA), Max Bergman (SRaM, University of Basel), Mark New (Pro Vice-Chancellor, University of Cape Town), Frans Swanepoel (FutureAfrica, University of Pretoria) and Francis Petersen (Vice-Chancellor-designate, University of the Free State). The Forum will provide a stage for national and international debates on sustainability in South Africa, the African continent, and about international perspectives on sustainability. It brings together researchers and representatives from government and the business sector to discuss a wide-ranging set of issues associated with sustainability, including food security, water and energy scarcity, mining, poverty reduction, climate change, and urbanisation.

The next few decades will be marked by profound changes in the relationships between global economics, national societies, and the environment. We have entered what some call the Anthropocene, an age in which human activity dominates the climate and the environment. These changes will have numerous consequences on societies around the globe. South Africa and Africa will play a central role, for better or worse, in creating opportunities and risks during these changing times as Africa is profoundly influencing and being influenced by global developments.

The adoption of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September 2015 was accompanied by what insiders considered an optimism they have not experienced in relation to UN resolutions before. The relative efficiency in the drafting, the lack of trenches between East and West, or between North and South, and the unanimity of support of the 193 countries speak volumes. In stark contrast, sustainability seems to go against a changing economic and political tide, where waves of nationalism and protectionism from some of the most powerful countries risk the wellbeing of the rest of the world. The 6^th World Sustainability Forum will enable fruitful exchanges, which sensitise South African and international communities to the global urgency and specifics of sustainability.

The Forum will showcase the work of internationally renowned researchers and include more than 150 presentations. During the conference dinner, the World Sustainability Award, associated with a US$ 100 000 prize, will be announced, as well as the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award, associated with a US$ 10 000 prize. The prizes are sponsored by the MDPI Sustainability Foundation and Sustainability, an academic open access journal by MDPI. The World Sustainability Forum is preceded by the Postgraduate Forum on Sustainability, which will introduce more than 100 young scholars from South Africa and the African continent to sustainability research. Both events are organized and sponsored by the University of Cape Town, the University of the Western Cape, the University of Basel, MDPI, and by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.

Contacts:

Scientific Matters: Prof Manfred Max Bergman, Social Research and Methodology Group (SRaM), University of Basel, Switzerland; Email:  [email protected]

Press Accreditation and General Enquiries: Mr Matthias Burkhalter, MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland; Email: [email protected]; Tel. +41 61 683 77 34 

Follow us on Twitter

#WSF2017SA

We are pleased to announce that Professor Peter Van Puyvelde has been appointed as Section Editor-in-Chief of “Applied Materials” in Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). His appointment started from December 2016.

Peter Van Puyvelde (1971) is professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Leuven, Belgium. In 1999, he obtained his PhD in chemical engineering from the same university under the supervision of Professor Paula Moldenaers. His PhD work dealt with the development of rheo-optical methodologies for the study of structure formation in immiscible polymeric systems. After spending six months at the Technical University Eindhoven in 2002, working with Han Meijer and Patrick Anderson, he joined the faculty in Leuven.

His current research focusses on flow-induced structuring of polymeric materials with a strong interest in additive manufacturing techniques. The key aspect of his work is his systematical scientific approach towards processing related problems, using a broad range of experimental methodologies such as rheology and rheo-optics. He is the author of more than 150 scientific publications, including peer-reviewed journal papers and conference proceedings and has delivered invited lectures in academic and industrial settings. He is a member of the Polymer Processing Society (PPS), Society of Rheology (SoR) and is the current President of the Belgian Group of Rheology (BGR). 

We would like to warmly welcome Professor Van Puyvelde as Section Editor-in-Chief and look forward to developing the Section “Applied Materials” under his leadership.

MDPI is now a proud supporter of the OA2020 Initiative.

Open Access 2020 is an international initiative that aims to induce the swift, smooth and scholarly-oriented transformation of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to open access publishing.

MDPI is participating in the upcoming Berlin13 conference in March 2017, where we are contributing to the initiative by aiding in the design of the roadmap which will make OA the default publishing model.

For more information please see here.

We are pleased to announce that MDPI will be attending the 2017 SPIE Photonics West Conference (28 January-2 February, 2017) and representing the following open access journals:

Sensors
Photonics
Micromachines
Materials
Applied Sciences
Journal of Imaging
Inventions
Computation
Technologies
Remote Sensing
Biosensors
Electronics

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #4220) and meet the representative editors.

Conference details:

SPIE Photonics West 2017
28 January-2 February, 2017
Moscone Center
747 Howard St
San Francisco, CA 94103, USA

We are pleased to announce that the University of Texas at Arlington, USA, the Harbin Institute of Technology, China and TU Darmstadt, Germany, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

Season's greetings from everyone at MDPI!

We are pleased to announce that the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Germany and the University of California, Berkeley, USA, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

The Wellcome Trust has, for a number of years, required that the results of its funded projects are published in open access format. Recently it announced criteria that publishers must fulfil for publication fees to be paid by the Trust. MDPI is pleased to have been added to the list of compliant publishers.

Only publishers who have confirmed their compliance by 16 December 2016 will be eligible to receive payment of APCs by the Wellcome Trust as of 1 April 2017. For more information on the criteria and a full list of publishers that meet them, see here.

MDPI is currently attending the 2016 AGU Fall Meeting (12–16 December, 2016)

If you are also attending the conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #1147) and meet the representative editors.

Conference details:

2016 AGU Fall Meeting
12–16 December 2016
Moscone Center
747 Howard St
San Francisco, CA 94103, USA

We are pleased to announce that Purdue University, USA, the Universitat Politécnica de Valencia, Spain and the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

The deadline for the World Sustainability Award has been extended for one last time! You now have one more month to nominate an individual researcher, group or project! The final deadline for nominations will be December 15, 2016. 

For full details, please visit here.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Minnesota, USA, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

MDPI has become a member of the United Nations Global Compact to support corporate sustainability and have committed ourselves to the ten principles associated with the Compact.

Sustainability has always been at the core of MDPI’s values, starting with the collection and preservation of rare chemical samples that started in 1996 and led to the first journal, Molecules. Sustainability has become one of our flagship journals and we have supported and organized several conferences and events based on Sustainability, including the upcoming 6th World Sustainability Forum. As a global enterprise, we see it as our duty to promote responsible practices that will ensure a bright future for our planet. Given this, the choice to join the Global Compact was an easy one and we will do our utmost to fully implement it.

We are delighted to announce that MDPI has become a member of SPARC Europe, an organization that works for open scholarship in Europe, including support of open access publication.

As one of the few publishers to join SPARC Europe to date, MDPI looks forward to making a contribution that puts open scholarship on a positive and sustainable path. We fully support the goals of open scholarship that allow the largest number of people possible to benefit from work of researchers in all disciplines. We hope that our membership will enable us to work with other stakeholders to find the best possible solution.

The deadline for the World Sustainability Award has been extended! You now have until November 15, 2016 to nominate an individual researcher, group or project!

For full details, please visit here.

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We are pleased to announce that the Wuppertal Institut, Germany, the University of Girona, Spain and Central South University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

Meet us during International Open Access Week 2016! We will be presenting at various locations in Europe and China. 

To get involved and for full details see the complete list of events organised by MDPI here.

We are pleased to announce that the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain and Aalto University, Finland, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the Iowa State University and the University of North Texas, USA, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

Meet MDPI during the Open Access Days held from 10-11 October 2016 at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. 

The two-day event will feature experts from the open access sector, scientists from all disciplines, publishing representatives and supporters of scientific research and communication from libraries as well as research institutes and funding institutions. Join us!

For more information about the event and to see the program, visit the event webpage.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Sevilla and the University of Alicante, Spain have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Delaware, USA, has joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from this university will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

As an open access publisher indebted to the work of our peer reviewers, we are proud to support Peer Review Week 2016. As part of the week's activities and to celebrate this year's theme "Recognition for Review", MDPI will host two webinars that anyone can join.

These webinars will explore the role and value of reviewers and the recognition they receive from a publishers perspective, with examples from MDPI's experience in publishing nearly 80,000 peer reviewed papers, along with evidence from reviewer surveys. It will also touch upon potential changes in how review is carried out and tips for early career researchers who want to be involved in the review process.

Details and links to join can be found below:

Wednesday September 21, 08:00 (CEST)

Friday September 23, 16:00 (CEST)

For more information about all the activites taking place, please visit the Peer Review Week website.

We are pleased to announce that Kansas State University and Northwestern Universty, USE, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that University College Cork, Ireland, has joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from this university will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that MDPI has now moved to a new permanent address:

MDPI AG
St. Alban Anlage 66
CH-4052 Basel
Postfach, CH-4020 Basel
Switzerland

Telephone and fax numbers remain unchanged.

We are pleased to announce that MDPI will be attending the 252nd American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition (21-25 August, 2016) representing the following open access journals:

Molecules
Materials
Marine Drugs
IJMS
Polymers
Applied Sciences
Membranes
Metabolites
Pharmaceuticals
Biomolecules
Symmetry

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth 411) and meet our representatives.

Conference details:

ACS - American Chemical Society Fall Meeting 2016
21-25 August, 2016

Pennsylvania Convention Center
1101 Arch St
Philadelphia
PA 19107
USA

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program in August 2016:

• University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland
• University of Granada, Spain
• Compultense University of Madrid, Spain

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program in July 2016:

• Louisiana State University, USA
• Florida State University, USA
• Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland
• University of Rostock, Germany
• AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
• Southeast University, China

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

As of 20 August 2016, MDPI's new address in Basel will be:

MDPI AG
St. Alban-Anlage 66
CH-4052 Basel
Switzerland

Telephone and fax numbers remain unchanged.

St. Alban-Anlage 66 was built from 1947 to 1948 and initially the home of the "Bühler AG", a book printing business. 

From the 15-16 September, 2016, MDPI will run a course on Academic Publishing at the University of Basel.

In this two day workshop, MDPI will look in detail at the role performed by academic journal publishers and how they interact with academics. Ethical dimensions, what happens when problems occur and how the publisher coordinates all aspects of the submission process will also be covered. 

For more detailed information about the program, trainers and registration please visit the course webpage.

We are pleased to report the 2015 Journal Impact Factors in the latest Journal Citation Reports® Science Edition, published by Thomson Reuters in June 2016. Twenty out of 25 journals have seen an increase in their Impact Factor and two journals (Crystals and IJGI) received a first Impact Factor. Coatings was recently added to SCIE and will receive its first Impact Factor in next year’s JCR.

Updated Impact Factors for Journals in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)

Journals with First Impact Factors

We are pleased to inform you that the new Impact Factor of Applied Sciences has been released. According to the Journal Citation Reports®, published by Thomson Reuters in June 2016, the new Impact Factor is 1.726, and the 5-Year Impact Factor is 1.773. Compared to last year, the Impact Factor has increased by 16 percent (see figures below).

Applied Sciences now ranks 129/271 (Q2) in the category ‘Materials Science, Multidisciplinary’, 83/163 (Q3) in ‘Chemistry, Multidisciplinary’, and 64/145 (Q2) in the category 'Physics, Applied’.

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Applied Sciences:

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program in May 2016:

• Unversity of Bremen, Germany
• Koç University, Turkey
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria
• Jilin University, China
• Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program in April and May 2016:

• KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• South China University of Technology, China
• Beijing University of Technology, China
• Southern Medical University, China

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that another MDPI journal is offering awards to support and encourage junior researchers.

The journal Applied Sciences is currently accepting applications and nominations for two Travel Awards to sponsor postdoctoral researchers to attend conferences in 2017. Find more information about the awards and how to apply here.

You may have noticed a new section that is now visible on our home page. This section is called "Latest Books" and showcases recent publications from MDPI Books, our book publishing service.

By clicking on the hyperlink "More Books" you will be taken to the MDPI Books Home Page. There you will find more information about the service, as well as the "Recent Publications" list. 

Clicking on any of the book images in this list will take you to detailed information about that book (shown below). Here you can also download a PDF version of the book, or order a hardcover printed copy.

For further information about the MDPI Books service, please visit the webpage or contact [email protected].

We are pleased to announce that the journals Axioms, Behavioral Sciences, Photonics, Separations and Toxics were recently accepted for inclusion in the newly launched Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in Web of Science.

ESCI serves to highlight promising journals which are still under consideration for the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) or the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).

The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index
(SSCI), and Web of Science™ (WoS) are Thomson Reuters products.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Winchester, UK, the Silesian University of Technology, Poland and Beijing Jiaotong University and Zhejiang University, China, have joined our Institutional Membership program. Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are excited to announce the opening of our new editorial office in Barcelona, Spain. The launch team is led by a Senior Editor and comprises further staff holding doctoral degrees with several years of research experience. The new editorial team will help us to get closer to European research communities and progress Sciforum, the platform to support the scientific community via conference hosting and other functions. They will also help spread the word about Open Access and meet academics at scientific events.

We are in the process of hiring more doctoral and masters graduates to join the editorial team and welcome applications via [email protected]. For contact details about the office, see our contact page.

We are pleased to announce that the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) has signed an agreement with MDPI to support authors associated with the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft). As of 22 February 2016, corresponding authors will receive full funding from the MPDL for articles published in MDPI journals, with a 10% discount applied to the Article Processing Charges. Additional details can be found at our institutional membership page.

Founded in 1948, The Max Planck Society is one of Germany’s leading research organizations, and is currently made up of 83 institutes conducting basic research in natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences and humanities. 18 Nobel laureates have emerged from its ranks of scientists and the society has more than 15,000 publications in scientific journals each year.

We are pleased to announce that Wageningen University, the Netherlands, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain, the University of Zürich and ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and the University of Tübingen and Osnabrück University, Germany, have not only renewed their institutional memberships with MDPI after two years of successful cooperation, but have also increased the reduction of the article processing charges (APCs) for affiliated authors to 25%.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that Brock University, Cananda, and the University of Pisa, Italy, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges as of 01 February 2016. 

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

MDPI is pleased to announce its newly established sponsorship of diss:kurs, an event coordinated by the University of Basel to support their doctorate program. For more information about the event and how to register, please visit the diss:kurs webpage.

Rajender S. Varma, Ph.D.
U. S. Environmental Protection Agency
National Risk Management Research Laboratory
Sustainable Technology Division
26 West Martin Luther King Drive, MS 443
Cincinnati, Ohio 45268, USA
Website: http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/std/green_chem_nano.html
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kzbCKOQAAAAJ&hl=en
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rajender_Varma/info

Citation:
"Sustainable Strategies for Risk Reduction In Nanotechnology:
Application in Chemical Catalysis and Environmental Remediation".

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program as of 1 January 2016:

• Tsinghua University, China
• Chinese Society of Micro-Nano Technology (CSMNT)
• Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
• University of Ulm, Germany

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that MDPI's open access journals Safety, Journal of Imaging, Fermentation, C-Journal of Carbon Research, Magnetochemistry, Batteries and Horticulturae released their first issue at the end of December 2015.

Season's greetings from everyone at MDPI!

We are pleased to announce that the University of Bern, Switzerland has not only renewed their institutional membership with MDPI after two years of successful cooperation, but also increased the reduction of the article processing charges (APCs) for affiliated authors to 25%.

We are pleased to announce that University of Ulm, Germany and Helmholtz Zentrum Munich, Germany has joined MDPI's institutional membership program:

Primary authors from the University of Ulm and Helmholtz Zentrum Munich will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges as of 1 January 2016. Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that Virginia Tech has joined MDPI's institutional membership program. Authors from Virginia Tech will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges as of 1 December 2015. Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the journal Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417) was recently selected to be included in Scopus. Citations are expected to be available in Scopus soon.

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and is published by Elsevier B.V. This means that the research you publish with Applied Sciences will be more visible than ever. Applied Sciences is an international open access journal that covers all aspects of applied natural sciences.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have joined MDPI's institutional membership program:

• Technical University of Denmark (as of 1 November 2015)
• University of North Florida, USA (as of 15 November 2015)

Primary authors from the Technical University of Denmark and the University of North Florida will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have joined MDPI's institutional membership program:

University of Freiburg, Germany
University of Regensburg, Germany

Primary authors from the University of Freiburg and the University of Regensburg will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges as of 1 October 2015 and 1 November 2015.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to report the first Impact Factor for Applied Sciences for 2014. According to the 2015 Journal Citation Reports® Science Edition, published in June 2015 by Thomson Reuters, the first Impact Factor for Applied Sciences is 1.484.

Applied Sciences enters the ranking in the categories ‘Chemistry, Multidisciplinary’ (SCIE) placed 78 out of 157 (Q2), ‘Materials Science, Multidisciplinary’ (SCIE) placed 138 out of 259 (Q3) and ‘Physics, Applied’ (SCIE) placed 78 out of 143 (Q3).