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 hope to call upon your expertise as a reviewer to help maintain the quality and efficiency of Brain Sciences.

We are particularly interested in recruiting reviewers in the following fields covered by Brain Sciences. In recent decades, this area has attracted great research interest, and significant progress has been made. We welcome scholars with research experience in topics including but not limited to the following:

• neuropsychology, social cognitive, and affective neuroscience;
• neurodegenerative diseases, psychiatric diseases;
• neurorehabilitation, neuromuscular, and movement disorders;
• neurodevelopmental processes;
• synaptic maintenance, synaptic plasticity, synaptic de- and reorganization, neuron–glia communication, neurogenomics;
• central and peripheral neural interfaces, neural circuits;
• neural decoding and encoding algorithms;
• neural computation and modeling;
• brain–machine and brain–computer interfaces, nanotechnology, neuroprostheses;
• neural signal processing, neuroinformatics;
• neuroimaging;
• neurobiology of language, neurolinguistics.

We will extend the following benefits to reviewers:

1. The Brain Sciences Editorial Board will acknowledge all reviewers in its annual reviewer list through a publication/announcement in the “Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Brain Sciences” editorial on the journal website.
2. Reviewer members who provide prompt, thorough, rigorous peer review reports will receive a voucher that can be applied to reduce the cost of their next publication in an MDPI journal.
3. We hold an Outstanding Reviewer Award each year to acknowledge our reviewers who so generously give their time to review papers for the journal. There would be a chance for you to receive this award. Please click here for more details: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/brainsci/awards.
4. Reviewers may be presented with the option to join the Editorial Board of the journal (subject to the approval of the Editor-in-Chief).

If you are interested in this work, please contact Brain Sciences Editorial Office or directly submit your information at https://susy.mdpi.com/volunteer/profile/edit.

We would greatly appreciate your support and hope you are interested in joining our team of reviewers!

Brain Sciences Editorial Office

In order to better categorize the papers published in the journal, 15 new sections have recently been established, as listed below. We are now recruiting Editorial Board Members for new sections:

• Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience;
• Sensory and Motor Neuroscience;
• Neurodegenerative Diseases;
• Neuromuscular and Movement Disorders;
• Psychiatric Diseases;
• Neuropharmacology;
• Neural Control of Peripheral Function;
• Neuroenergetics Nutrition and Brain Health;
• Neuro-oncology;
• Neuropathology
• Neurorehabilitation;
• Neurosurgery and Neuroanatomy;
• Neuroscience of Pain;
• Neurotology and Neuro-Ophthalmology;
• Neurovirology.

If you are an active researcher in the field and are passionate about participating in the publication of cutting-edge research, please do not hesitate to contact us about joining the Editorial Board. As an Editorial Board Member, you would have the following responsibilities:

• Making decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted or not based on the reports we collect;
• Serving as the Editor of a Special Issue on a topic related to your research interests when it is convenient for you;
• Reviewing a number of manuscripts in your area of interest when you are available;
• Recommending topics or appropriate conferences;
• Promoting Brain Sciences and increasing its visibility at related academic conferences.

Editorial Board Members are entitled to publish one paper free of charge in Brain Sciences each year and apply for additional discounts for papers invited by you.

Further information about the Editorial Board may be found at https://www.mdpi.com/editors.

If you are interested in becoming an Editorial Board Member, please contact Keer Wang (keer.wang@mdpi.com) at the Brain Sciences Editorial Office (brainsci@mdpi.com) and send us your full academic CV and a short cover letter that details your interest and enthusiasm for the position.

Brain Sciences Editorial Office

Brain Sciences (ISSN 2076-3425; CODEN: BSRCCS) has announced 15 new sections, listed below. Therefore, new Editor-in-Chief positions for the respective sections are open for application:

• Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience;
• Sensory and Motor neuroscience;
• Neurodegenerative Diseases;
• Neuromuscular and Movement disorders;
• Psychiatric Diseases;
• Neuropharmacology;
• Neural Control of Peripheral Function;
• Neuroenergetics Nutrition and Brain Health;
• Neuro-oncology;
• Neuropathology;
• Neurorehabilitation;
• Neurosurgery and Neuroanatomy;
• Neuroscience of Pain;
• Neurotology and Neuro-ophthalmology;
• Neurovirology.

Brain Sciences (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/brainsci) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal on neuroscience published monthly online by MDPI, and led by Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Stephen D. Meriney from University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Should you decide to serve in one of the these sections, you would be responsible for some of the following tasks:

• Make decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted or not based on the reports that we collect;
• Check and approve the potential Special Issues in the section, suggest special topics or edit a Special Issue on a topic related to your research;
• Recommend the section board members to join and contribute to editorial work;
• Promote the journal and increase its visibility at related academic conferences;
• Advise on journal development.

If you are interested in this role or if you have any further inquiries, please feel free to contact us (brainsci@mdpi.com).

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)

You are cordially invited to participate in the 2nd International Electronic Conference on Brain Sciences. This event aims to bring together researchers working in the field of neuroscience, to present and discuss their recent contributions, without the need for travel. During this e-conference, a live session will also be held on 15th of July 2021.

The field of neuroscience is one of the last frontiers in biomedical studies, as many of the details that control brain function are still not well understood. This makes the study of the nervous system very exciting and fast moving. This conference will address a variety of research topics, which reflect some of the current areas of focus. These are organized into seven sessions, and include:

• Clinical Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience
• Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience
• Developmental Neuroscience
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Environmental Neuroscience

Accepted abstract submissions will be published in the proceedings of the conference, and authors are invited to elaborate their abstracts into full manuscripts that will be considered for publication in Brain Sciences, with a 20% discount on the APC. Brain Sciences is an open access journal from MDPI, in the field of neuroscience. The journal is indexed in the Sciences Citation Indexing Expended (SCIE IF=3.332), Scopus, and other databases. Citations are available in PubMed; full-text archived in PubMed Central (PMC). Please visit the following website for more information.

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/brainsci

Important Dates
• Abstract Submission: 10 April 2021
• Notification of Acceptance: 20 April 2021
• Submission of Full Manuscript to Brain Sciences: 1 June 2021
• Conference Date: 15–30 July 2021

You are welcome both to upload and present your work and to attend the conference completely free of charge.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions.

We look forward to welcoming you at this exciting meeting online.

https://sciforum.net/conference/IECBS2021

Brain Sciences (ISSN 2076-3425; CODEN: BSRCCS) have announced new section “Educational Neuroscience”. Therefore, new postion of Editor-in-Chief is open for application.

Brain Sciences (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/brainsci) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal on neuroscience published monthly online by MDPI, and led by Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Stephen D. Meriney from University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Should you decide to serve on this section, you would be responsible for some of the following tasks:

• Make decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted or not based on the reports we collect;
• Check and approve the potential Special Issues in the section, suggest special topics or edit a Special Issue on a topic related to your research;
• Recommend the section board members to join and contribute to editorial work;
• Promote the journal and increase its visibility at related academic conferences;
• Advise on the journal development.

If you are interested in this role or if you have any further inquiries, please feel free to contact us (brainsci@mdpi.com).