Announcements

This serves to announce to our valued authors based in Japan that value-added tax, or consumption tax will now be imposed on article processing fees and other service fees for all papers submitted, or resubmitted (assigned new paper IDs), effective from 15 August 2021. The change is in accordance with the Japanese "Act for Partial Revision of the Income Tax Act and Other Acts" (Act No. 9 of 2015), which includes a revision of consumption taxation on cross-border supplies of services such as digital content distribution.

For additional information from the National Tax Agency please see here ("Cross-border supplies of electronic services").

Contact: Setsuko Nishihara, MDPI Tokyo

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)

We are pleased to announce that 92 new scholars were recently appointed as Editorial Board Members for the journal Biology.

Dr. Jiang Liu (Marshall University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Fang-Xiang Wu (University of Saskatchewan, Canada);
Prof. Dr. Charalambos Kyriacou (University of Leicester, UK);
Prof. Dr. Takatoshi Tanisaka (Kibi International University);
Dr. Alper Kucukural (University of Massachusetts Medical School, USA);
Prof. Dr. Matteo Bertini (University of Ferrara, Italy);
Dr. Huizhong Chen (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, USA);
Prof. Dr. Weiguo Cao (Clemson University, USA);
Dr. Fabien Aubret (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France);
Prof. Dr. Yin Hua Zhang (Seoul National University, Korea);
Dr. Zipei Zhang (Harvard Medical School, USA);
Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Peruzzi (University of Pisa, Italy);
Prof. Dr. Hiromitsu Tanaka (Nagasaki International University, Japan);
Prof. Dr. Chengguo Xing (University of Florida, USA);
Prof. Dr. Gabriella Nicolini (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy);
Dr. Xu Peng (Texas A&M University College of Medicine, USA);
Dr. David C. Plachetzki (University of New Hampshire, USA);
Prof. Dr. Harri Piitulainen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland);
Prof. Dr. Olivier Oudar (Université Paris 13, France) ;
Dr. Xinhua Shu (Glasgow Caledonian University, UK);
Dr. Ian Blaby (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA);
Dr. Katsumi Kitagawa (Texas A&M Health Science Center, USA);
Dr. Tigst Demeke (Canadian Grain Commission, Canada);
Dr. Mark Bond (University of Bristol, UK);
Prof. Dr. Lars Muckli (University of Glasgow, UK);
Prof. Dr. Jing Xu (Nankai University, China);
Dr. Dina Visca (University of Insubria, Italy);
Prof. Dr. William H. Konigsberg (Yale University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Honglong (James) Ji (University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler, USA);
Dr. Qi Chen (University of Auckland, New Zealand);
Dr. Natraj Krishnan (Mississippi State University, USA);
Dr. Lei Ye (National Heart Centre Singapore, Singapore);
Prof. Dr. Hiroyoshi Inoue (Keio University School of Medicine, Japan);
Prof. Dr. Dirk Rades (University of Lübeck, Germany);
Dr. Yuval Cinnamon (Agricultural Research Organization, Israel);
Dr. Sunita Ramesh (Flinders University, Australia);
Dr. Oswaldo Palenzuela (Spanish National Research Council, Spain);
Prof. Dr. Shuren Li (Medical University of Vienna, Austria);
Dr. Je-Hyun Yoon (Medical University of South Carolina, USA);
Dr. Youngshim Choi (University of Maryland School of Medicine, USA);
Dr. Cheng Wang (Massachusetts General Hospital, USA);
Dr. Lourdes A. Fortepiani (University of the Incarnate Word, USA);
Dr. Mi Li (University of Tennessee, USA);
Dr. Athar Ansari (Wayne State University, USA);
Dr. Patrick Y. Sips (Ghent University, Belgium);
Prof. Dr. Jijun Tang (University of South Carolina, USA);
Dr. Zhongjian Cheng (Temple University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Carol A. Brenner (University of New England, USA);
Dr. Sylvia L.F. Pender (University of Southampton, UK);
Dr. Tomas Majtan (University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, USA);
Dr. Joseph Kwong (Keele University, UK);
Dr. Zhaogang Yang (The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA);
Prof. Dr. Melanie L. Hart (Medical Center—Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Germany);
Dr. Kwang Mook Jung (University of California-Irvine, USA);
Dr. Marie‑Lise Maddelein (Université de Toulouse, France);
Dr. Alfons Lawen (Monash University, Australia);
Prof. Dr. Yi Zhao (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China);
Prof. Dr. Qingbin Lu (University of Waterloo, Canada);
Dr. Lin Lu (Columbia University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Hua Xiang (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China);
Prof. Dr. Cheng Cameron Yin (The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA);
Dr. Obul Reddy Bandapalli (University of Heidelberg, Germany);
Prof. Dr. Charles D. Rice (Clemson University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Hiroetsu Suzuki (Nippon Veterinary and Life Science University, Japan);
Prof. Dr. Hengming Ke (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA);
Prof. Dr. Haiming Dai (Mayo Clinic, USA);
Prof. Dr. Ronaldo Ichiyama (University of Leeds, UK);
Prof. Dr. Éric Crubézy (Université Paul Sabatier, France);
Dr. Arianna Bellucci (University of Brescia, Italy);
Dr. Guo-Hao Lin (University of California San Francisco, USA);
Dr. Gilles Fischer (Sorbonne Université, France);
Prof. Dr. Luis Gandía (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain);
Prof. Dr. Takuya Furuichi (Nagoya University of Economics, Japan);
Dr. Wenzhong Xiao (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA);
Dr. Youlian Pan (National Research Council Canada, Canada);
Dr. Martin Barr (Trinity Centre for Health Sciences, Ireland);
Dr. Mridula Chopra (University of Portsmouth, UK);
Dr. Huaxin Sheng (Duke University School of Medicine, USA);
Prof. Dr. Martine Meunier (Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, France);
Prof. Dr. Naoki Yamamoto (Fujita Health University, Japan);
Dr. Claus Nielsen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark);
Dr. Toshihiro Kushibiki (National Defense Medical College, Japan);
Prof. Dr. Qiwei Yang (Georgia Regents University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Andrea Casadei Gardini (Vita e Salute San Raffaele University, Italy);
Dr. De-Li Shi (Sorbonne University, France);
Dr. Simone Tambaro (Karolinska Institutet, Sweden);
Prof. Dr. Annemiek Van Spriel (Radboud University Medical Center, The Netherlands);
Dr. Michele Cea (University of Genoa and IRCCS Ospedale Policlinico San Martino, Italy);
Dr. Barak Rotblat (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel);
Prof. Dr. Paul D. Terry (University of Tennessee, USA);
Prof. Dr. Adrian Leuchtmann (ETH Zürich, Switzerland);
Dr. Georg Damm (Leipzig University, Germany);

We wish them every success in developing the journal. 

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 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)

MDPI is proud to adopt the principles of the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) to support building equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications.

The C4DISC represents organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications and is focused on addressing issues of diversity and inclusion within the publishing industry.

MDPI’s Managing Editors encourage the Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, geographic location, sexual orientation, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and editors of MDPI journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.

Representatives from C4DISC meet monthly, and have started to implement initiatives to shed light and improve on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. Some of the initiatives include developing a joint statement of principles; conducting market research; providing training resources, best practices, toolkits, and documentation for our collective memberships; and establishing outreach programs, curricula, events, and publications.

The Coalition is committed to:

• eliminating barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination;
• creating and maintaining an environment that respects diverse traditions, heritages, and experiences;
• promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making;
• raising awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce;
• supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations.

At MDPI we have slightly revised the layout for articles to be published in the 2021 Volume, starting at the end of December 2020. As of today, the article templates available for download on ‘Instructions for Authors’ pages have been updated.

The most noticeable change can be found on the first page of the article, where a left-hand column has been created to include the following front matter elements: (i) the recommended citation style for the article, (ii) the publishing history, (iii) as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license used (iv) a standard note regarding affiliations. At the same time, the extra spacing on the left means the authors’ affiliations are now more clearly set apart than before. Other front matter key elements such as journal logo, article type, article title, authors, abstract and keywords remain unchanged.

The blank column on the left runs through all pages in an article; as a result, the main text is slightly more condensed, which improve reader friendliness for smaller screens. Small figures/tables are aligned on the left with standard indenture, while large figures/tables are centered and covering the full width of the page. The revised layout was applied in the article pictured below, to serve as an example:

1) Information is displayed in the left information bar.

2) In the main text, there is a blank column on the left.

3) Small tables/figures are aligned on the left, large tables/figures are centered.

We are pleased to acknowledge that many academic editors who have made an impact on MDPI journals as editorial board members, editors-in-chief, or section editors, are recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Highly Cited Researchers highlights the top 1% of researchers, by citations, in one or more of the 22 fields used in Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We offer our congratulations to 279 academic editors of MDPI journals who were recognized as the most influential scholars in their fields in 2020.

The full list of 2020 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed on https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2020/

--- Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) is a Clarivate product.

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our Open Access agreement with Jisc Collections, which will allow UK institutions to benefit from access to article processing charge (APC) discounts and streamlined payment workflows.

All institutions participating in the agreement will also gain access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information for easy identification and additional transparency.

Eligible 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.

About Jisc

Jisc's vision is for the UK to be the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the world. At its heart is the super-fast national research and education network, Janet, with built-in cyber security protection.  Jisc also provides technology solutions for its members (colleges, universities and research centres) and customers (public sector bodies), helps members save time and money by negotiating sector-wide deals and provides advice and practical assistance on digital technology. Jisc is funded by the UK higher and further education and research funding bodies and member institutions.

For more information, contact helen.dobson@jisc.ac.uk.

About MDPI

MDPI is a publisher of fully peer-reviewed, Open Access journals with a focus on thorough and rapid editorial processing. Its aim is to ensure that high-quality research is verified and made available to the research community as quickly as possible. MDPI stands at the forefront of the Open Access movement, having launched its first online journal Molecules in 1996. Today, MDPI is a leader in Open Access publishing with over 250 journals across all research disciplines, and all content published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

For any questions about this agreement, please contact the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.