Announcements

MDPI will be attending the IEEE-2021 International Conference of Optical Imaging and Measurement (ICOIM 2021), which is going to be held in Xi’an, China, from the 27^th to the 29^th of August 2021.

Optical imaging and measurement are closely related and have a wide range of applications such as microscopes, telescopes, sensors, etc. Usually, imaging is the basis of measurement, and measurement is a rigorous consideration of imaging results in a quantitative way. This conference covers the broad field of advanced optical imaging and precision measurement technologies, ranging from micro to macro, from static to dynamic, from single physical quantity to multiple. Optical methods continuously have a profound impact on new developments in the field of science and technology, such as milestone breakthroughs, STED optical nanoscope (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014), and LIGO’s interferometer (Nobel Prize in Physics 2017). This conference is looking forward to opening a discussion between optical scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Applied Sciences (leading journal);
• Journal of Imaging;
• Photonics;
• Sensors.

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth. 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://www.icoim.org/.

Conference website: https://asec2021.sciforum.net/

We would like to invite you to join the 2nd International Electronic Conference on Applied Sciences (ASEC 2021) that will be hosted online from 15–31 October 2021. ASEC 2021 will be free of charge for presenters and visitors. There will be an opportunity to publish papers peer-reviewed and accepted for a Special Issue of Applied Sciences (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/2nd_IECAS). MDPI offers a 10% discount on the fees for publication in this Special Issue.

ASEC 2021 aims to promote and advance the exciting and rapidly changing fields representing all aspects of applied sciences. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Optics and Lasers (Session A)
• Chemistry (Session B)
• Applied Biosciences and Bioengineering (Session C)
• Environmental and Sustainable Science and Technology (Session D)
• Applied Physics (Session E)
• Computing and Artificial Intelligence (Session F)
• Applied Dentistry (Session G)
• Foods Science and Technology (Session H)
• Mechanical Engineering (Session I)

We hope that you share our enthusiasm for this project and will join us in ensuring this conference is a success.

We are pleased to report that the 2020 Impact Factor of Applied Sciences has increased to 2.679 from 2.474 in the recent release of Journal Citation Reports®. The journal’s 5-Year Impact Factor is 2.736. Applied Sciences now ranks 101/179 (Q3) in the category “Chemistry, Multidisciplinary”, 38/91 (Q2) in “Engineering, Multidisciplinary”, 201/335 (Q3) in “Materials Sciences, Multidisciplinary” and 73/160 (Q2) in “Physics, Applied”.

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

Source: data according to Journal Citation Reports®, 2020 release, a Clarivate Analytics product.

The 2020 citation metrics have been officially released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)!

We are pleased to announce that 85 MDPI journals are included, of which:

• 10 journals received their first impact factor
• 96% of journals increased their impact factor from 2019
• 32 journals (38%) ranked among the top 25% of journals, in at least one category

* Journals given their first Impact Factor in 2021

Source: 2020 Journal Impact Factors, Journal Citation Reports ® (Clarivate, 2021)

Special Issue "Women in Smart Industrial System"

Prof. Dr. Antonella Petrillo

Editorial Board Member of Applied Sciences

Department of Engineering, University of Naples “Parthenope”, Italy

Editorial Board Member of Applied Sciences

Guest Editor of the Special Issue " Women in Smart Industrial System"

Introduction: Antonella Petrillo received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Cassino. Her research interests include multi-criteria decision analysis, sustainability, digitalization, smart manufacturing and supply chain management.

Contribution: Prof. Petrillo has published more than 176 peer-reviewed journal/conference papers within the above-mentioned topics, and several books as an editor and/or co-editor. She also serves as an international reviewer for over 50 international journals and she is a member of scientific committees for PhD programs, international conferences and proposal evaluations.

Do you want to say something to celebrate 23^rd June—International Women in Engineering Day?

We are living in an epochal historical period, imaginable (perhaps), predictable (perhaps), but that we never imagined could really happen. This period will be remembered as the time of a world pandemic in a globalized world, the likes of which have never been seen before. A Black Swan. We have no idea what work will look like in 2050. However, we are certain that we are experiencing an epochal period that will change our ways of working as well as our ways of living. We do know that we are living in a period in which revolutions in biotechnology and information technology are putting humanity in the face of difficult trials, perhaps the most difficult trails that it has ever encountered. We are witnessing an epochal paradigm shift in the interaction between “man” and “machine”. The pandemic is proving to be a catalyst for digitization processes. If talent used to be everywhere but opportunities were concentrated in a few places in the world, now talents themselves can create opportunities everywhere. In a future of work where the physical-biological and digital levels will be in symbiosis, the problem will not be a gender issue. Only cooperation and collaboration between motivated minds with a clear goal will be able to overcome the global challenges of the near future. Women, like men, must have this awareness by promoting the empowerment of mankind. We are first women, first men, and then engineers. Science has no gender.

Special Issue "Women in Building Materials"

1. Prof. Dr. Carmen Martínez-García

Department of Chemical, Environmental and Material Engineering, High Polytechnic School of Linares, University of Jaen, Jaén, Spain

Guest Editor of the Special Issue " Women in Building Materials"

Introduction: Since 2015, Prof. Dr. Carmen Martínez-García  has been the Managing Director of the Academic Organization of the University of Jaén. She was previously the Subdirector of Quality and Attention to Disability of the Superior Polytechnic School of Linares of the University of Jaén (2012-2015). Since 2004, Prof. Dr. Carmen Martínez-García  has belonged to the Materials Engineering and Mining Research Group. The lines of research that Prof. Dr. Carmen Martínez-García has worked on are: Materials Engineering, Advanced Materials, Construction Materials and Waste Recovery. Prof. Dr. Carmen Martínez-García’s research work is mainly focused on the line of waste recovery in clay products and the circular economy.

Contribution: Prof. Dr. Carmen Martínez-García has more than 80 contributions to national and international congresses in the area of materials and environment, and 31 articles in international journals indexed in JCR.

2. Prof. Dr. María Teresa Cotes-Palomino

Department of Chemical, Environmental and Material Engineering, High Polytechnic School of Linares, University of Jaen, Jaén, Spain

Guest Editor of the Special Issue " Women in Building Materials"

Introduction: Since 2009, Prof. Dr. María Teresa Cotes-Palomino has been a part of the Materials Engineering and Mining Research Group. The lines of research that Prof. Dr. María Teresa Cotes-Palomino has worked on are: Materials Engineering, Advanced Materials, Construction Materials and Waste Recovery.

Contribution: Prof. Dr. María Teresa Cotes-Palomino has made 54 contributions to national and international congresses in the area of materials and environment, and 10 articles in international journals indexed in JCR.

Do you want to say something to celebrate 23^rd June—International Women in Engineering Day?

It is a very important day to raise awareness and highlight the role of women in a sector traditionally dominated by men. It is essential to make the sector and society aware of the value of women's work and research in engineering and, at the same time, to encourage vocations among young female students, so that they see engineering as their future professional career.

We are pleased to report that the CiteScore of Applied Sciences has increased to 3.0 (from 2.4). For full details of the current CiteScore release, please refer to the journal’s Source profile (https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100829268).

MDPI Books recently released Book Builder, a new online tool to conveniently arrange, design and produce an eBook from any content published in MDPI journals. Book Builder offers two functions: on the one hand (1) Selections, available to every registered user of MDPI; on the other hand (2) Special Issue Reprints, which can be used exclusively by Guest Editors of Special Issues.

Selections

In just a matter of a few clicks, all users are now able to assemble books from MDPI articles and receive instantaneous feedback in the form of a fully produced and compiled book (PDF), which can be downloaded or ordered as print copy. Selections can include any paper published with MDPI, picking and combining content from different journals and special issues.

This way, the user may for example choose to compile an ebook focusing around a particular topic, or assemble articles from a group of others.

We invite you to make yourself familiar with the new tool! The Book Builder can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/books/book_builder.

Special Issue Reprints

The Book Builder allows Guest Editors of MDPI journals to create a reprint from a successfully completed Special Issue or Topical Collection in book format. If you are a Guest Editor for an MDPI journal, you can use the new tool  to create an PDF document which includes all articles published in the Special Issue as well as a book cover and table of contents.

For Special Issues containing a minimum of 5 articles, the Guest Editor can request its publication on the MDPI Book platform. Published reprints are assigned an ISBN and DOI.

In addition to the PDF copy of the Reprint Book, as a token of our gratitude, MDPI offers every Guest Editor one (1) complimentary print copy (via print-on-demand). All contributors benefit from a discount on orders of any additional print copies, to share with colleagues or libraries or others.

Why choose MDPI Books?

In line with our organization's values, MDPI Books publishes all content in open access, promoting the exchange of ideas and knowledge in a globalized world. MDPI Books encompasses all the benefits of open access—high availability and visibility, as well as wide and rapid dissemination. MDPI Books are distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License, meaning as an author you retain the copyright for your work. In addition, with MDPI Books you can complement the digital version of your work with a high-quality printed counterpart.

If you are interested in editing a book volume or series, or have a monograph manuscript to be considered for publication, please submit your proposal online and look at our Information for Authors.

Contact: Laura Wagner, MDPI Books Manager (email)

In order to specifically develop different research areas and attract more high-quality papers, we are pleased to announce the addition of the following four new Sections in Applied Sciences to cover all the disciplines of natural and applied science:

• Transportation and Future Mobility;
• Biomedical Engineering;
• Neurosciences;
• Fluid.

We are now recruiting Editorial Board Members (EBMs) for these Sections. If you are an active researcher in one of the aforementioned fields and are passionate about publishing cutting-edge research, please do not hesitate to get in touch (applsci@mdpi.com). Alternatively, you may wish to submit your work directly via the following link: https://susy.mdpi.com/user/manuscripts/upload/?journal=applsci.

Applied Sciences is an international, peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, and open access journal published quarterly online by MDPI. The journal covers all aspects of applied physics, applied chemistry, engineering, environmental and earth sciences, and applied biology.

In June of this year, MDPI will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its foundation. To mark this significant milestone, we have created a 25th Anniversary page on our website that evokes the development of our company over the past quarter-century.

MDPI has been a pioneer of Open Access publishing ever since the concept was first created.

In a wide-ranging interview, our CEO Delia Mihaila reflects on the company’s 25th anniversary and its contribution to the world of scientific publishing.

Delia considers how MDPI has evolved since starting life in 1996 as a visionary ‘project’ run out of an apartment in Basel, Switzerland, by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin. A chemist who was passionate about the long-term preservation of rare chemical sample, Dr. Lin was determined to help scholars publish their findings as quickly as possible and make their research results available to as wide a readership as possible worldwide. That determination remains unchanged 25 years later.

Today, MDPI is an international organization with over 4,000 employees based on three continents and in ten countries, and ranks among the world's top four academic publishers.

MDPI's mission is to accelerate access to new scientific research, delivering insight faster for researchers worldwide. Read more here about the company's remarkable success story and what the Open Access publishing model can offer the global scientific community.

At MDPI, we strive to make your online publication process seamless and efficient. To achieve this, our team is continuously developing tools and features to make the user experience useful and convenient.

As the number of academic papers continues to grow, so does the need to analyze and work with them on a large scale. This prompted us to design a new feature aimed at helping researchers find journals that are relevant to their publication by matching their abstract topic. In this regard, we designed a similarity model that automatically identifies the most suitable academic journals for your paper.

We are pleased to introduce Journal Selector, a new feature that measures similarity in academic contexts. By simply entering the title and/or abstract into our Journal Selector, the author will see a list of the most related scientific journals published by MDPI. This method helps authors select the correct journals for their papers, highlighting the time of publication and citability.

The methodology is known as representation learning, where words are represented as vectors in hyperspace. Representation helps us differentiate between different concepts within articles, and in turn, helps us identify similarities between them.

We used an advanced machine learning model to better capture the semantic meanings of words. This helps the algorithm make better predictions by leveraging scientific text representation. In turn, this ensures high precision, helping authors decide which journal they should submit their paper to.

The goal is to support authors to publish their work in the most suitable journal for their research, as fast as possible, accelerating their career progress.

Contact: Andrea Perlato, Head of Data Analytics, MDPI (email)