Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Encyclopedia will be awarding five Outstanding Contributor Awards for researchers in 2020. The nominations and applications will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee consisting of senior scholars from the Encyclopedia Editorial Board.

Prize for Winners

1. An official certificate;
2. A cash award of 500 CHF or an MDPI discount voucher of 800 CHF.

Application Deadline

31 December, 2020 (Please send your application email with a list of all entries you contributed to our office before the deadline: office@encyclopedia.pub)

Candidate Requirements

1. Have a Ph.D. degree;
2. Have more than three qualified entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020.

Evaluation Standards

1. Number of entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020;
2. Quality of entries online (including length, figure quality, and novelty);
3. Impact of entries (including the number of likes, discussion contents, views, and downloads).

If you are a researcher and have not yet contribute entries to Encyclopedia, please do not miss this chance to highlight your research results.

MDPI will be attending the American Thoracic Society (ATS) 2020 Congress in Philadelphia, PA, USA, 15–20 May 2020.

The ATS International Conference is the home of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep professionals, from those in the earliest stages of their careers to those whose research or strides in clinical care has gained them international recognition. Each year, nearly 14,000 of these professionals choose to attend, present, and learn about the latest advances, meet with colleagues from around the world, and strike new collaborations. It is truly where today’s science meets tomorrow’s care.

This international conference is also multidisciplinary. Clinicians and researchers in many other fields attend the conference, thereby enriching conversations that lead to insights that ultimately improve patient care.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• JCM
• IJERPH
• Medicina
• Cancers
• Children
• Brain Sciences
• Medicines
• JPM
• Healthcare

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth 1101). 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://conference.thoracic.org.

MDPI will be attending the Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC 2020) in Washington, DC, USA, 22–26 April 2020.
TAGC is a unique conference organized by the Genetics Society of America that gives you both topic-driven and community-specific sessions to foster collaboration and inspire fresh thinking.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Genes
• Life
• Brain Sciences
• Cancers
• IJMS
• Cells
• Healthcare
• Viruses
• Microorganisms

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth 723). 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://genetics-gsa.org/tagc-2020/.

It is our pleasure to announce that Brain Sciences, MDPI’s open access neuroscience research journal, has officially published more than one thousand articles and reviews since its inception in 2011. Brain Sciences (ISSN 2076-3425) is now included in the Science Citation Index Expanded in the Web of Science and received an Impact Factor of 2.786 for 2018. Brain Sciences’ current CiteScore in Scopus is 2.85, which equals rank 47/111 (Q2) in ‘General Neuroscience’.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Stephen D. Meriney has been appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Brain Sciences (ISSN 2076-3425). His term started in October 2019.

Stephen D. Meriney received his PhD in physiology/neuroscience from the University of Connecticut in 1987. After postdoctoral training with Dr. Alan Grinnell at the UCLA Jerry Lewis Neuromuscular Research Center, Professor Meriney joined the faculty in the Neuroscience Department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1993 where he is now professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry. His research program is focused on voltage-gated calcium channels, synaptic physiology and modulation, neuromuscular diseases, and the development of novel calcium channel gating modifiers as potential therapeutics for neuromuscular diseases. His research program has been continuously supported predominately by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

The editorial team warmly welcomes Professor Meriney as Editor-in-Chief and look forward to his contribution to the continued success of Brain Sciences. Professor Meriney is supported by a team of Section Editors-in-Chief: Professor Sergey Kasparov, Dr. Caterina Cinel, Professor Heather Bortfeld, Dr. Evanthia Bernitsas, Professor Pierluigi Zoccolotti, Dr. Jose Lujan, Professor Konstantin V. Slavin, Professor Jason Brandt, Dr. Andrew Clarkson and Dr. Mark Burke. For further information on the journal sections please see here.

At the same time, we would like to take the opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to the previous Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. German Barrionuevo, for his invaluable contribution to the journal.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of SciProfiles, its social network platform for researchers and scholars.

The purpose of SciProfiles is aligned with MDPI’s broad mission to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and to serve scholars and communities by providing opportunities for academic networking.

SciProfiles also ambitions to serve as a sustainable, transparent and community-driven research evaluation system aligned with the DORA principles (https://sfdora.org/). Through their scientific profiles, academics can highlight their contribution to research communities, and measure their impact on their field, beyond publication numbers and impact factors. SciProfiles is currently a beta version and will enrich to give researchers the possibility to highlight all of their contributions to science and their scientific communities as authors, reviewers, editors, conference organizers, conference panelists, conference keynote speakers, or even as lecturers or student mentors at their University.

The classic components of popular community social networks, including follower/following, classical metrics, endorsements and recommendations (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1690), comments (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397) are or will be very soon highlighted in SciProfiles as open science contributions.

To help increase the impact and visibility of articles and their authors to an appropriate audience, the platform offers a NewsFeed that includes recommendations of relevant content based on interests, publication history, saved searches or colleagues’ recommendations.

SciProfiles’ avatars are now being integrated on several MDPI platforms, meaning that you will directly access researchers’ profiles from any of the MDPI platforms:

MDPI's journal publishing website: www.mdpi.com
MDPI's conference hosting and management website: www.sciforum.net
MDPI's pre-print website : www.preprints.org
MDPI's knowledge sharing website : www.encyclopedia.pub
MDPI's books store: www.mdpi.com/books
MDPI's literature database : www.scilit.com

SciProfiles aims to serve scientific communities at large. It can be embedded into third-party websites and also welcomes integration of data from third-parties.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/2
Dr. Franck Vazquez: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/FranckVazquez
Dr. Martyn Rittman: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/martynrittman

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 MDPI Writing Prize. Entrants were asked to write on the theme "Judging research: How should research and researchers be evaluated and rewarded?" We received a large number of excellent essays from PhD students and postdocs, and the process of shortlisting and choosing winners was not an easy one. The winners demonstrated excellent writing skills alongside interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

As last year, we will begin the process of collating all entries into a book that will be available in open access format. Alongside promoting good writing skills, we see the prize as a way to promote the voices of early career researchers within broader debates and policy discussions.

Congratulations to all of the participants and especially the winners. The winners are:

1st Prize (500 CHF):
Albin Nilsson (National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland)
[Read here]

2nd Prize (250 CHF):
Qi Zhang (Shandong University, Jinan, China)
[Read here]
Igor Ogashawara (Indiana University, Indianapolis, US)
[Read here]

3rd Prize (100 CHF):
Margaret Sivapragasam (Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Perak, Malaysia)
[Read here]
Arvind Sharma (The University of Queensland, Gatton, Australia)
[Read here]
Jose Flores-Guerrero (University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands)
[Read here]

The MDPI Writing Prize is an annual award supported by MDPI Author Services, which provides services including language editing, reformatting, plagiarism checks, and image editing.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of a new functionality giving the possibility for researchers and scholars to endorse, and formally recommend articles to their colleagues.

MDPI was an early signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/read/) which calls for improvement in how quality and impact of scholarly research outputs are evaluated, especially in moving beyond journal-based citation metrics (journal Impact Factor, Scopus Citescore, etc.).

MDPI supports the establishment of article-level impact metrics, including citations, views, downloads, and Altmetric scores. These measures serve as an impact indicator for research articles on a case–by-case basis, assessing paper on its own merit. However, these metrics are also subjective and can give a biased picture of the article impact: they do not directly reflect the quality or the intrinsic scientific value of the article.

In our view, community engagement with publications based on community-driven metrics can help to overcome this limitation. We have therefore launched an option for scholars to endorse articles, indicating their own assessment of its content and making a recommendation to their community. This follows our implementation of the open source Hypothesis commenting tool, which has been available for all articles published by MDPI for over a year (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397). Both endorsement and commenting are available for all previously published and forthcoming MDPI articles.

In addition to potentially serving as a sustainable solution to article assessment, endorsements will help scientific communities to identify the most relevant articles, independently of the journal in which it was published.

The code for the endorsing functionality, which relies on DOIs and ORCIDs, will be made available on GitHub with an open source license.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, President and Founder
Dr. Franck Vazquez, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Martyn Rittman, Publishing Director

We are glad to inform you that MDPI will be attending the 2019 joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). The 2019 joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) will focus on cell biology as the fundamental basis of biology, and will offer sessions on emerging topics such as nontraditional model organisms, and the use of computational modeling and biophysics to "Build the Cell from the Ground Up".

Representatives of the following open-access journals will attend:

Biology
Biomolecules
Brain Sciences
Cancers
Cells
Genes
Healthcare
IJMS
Metabolites
Pathogens
Plants
Processes
Vaccines

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #132). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have.

Encyclopedia is a free online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as provide a comprehensive record of scientific development. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to contact us via office@encyclopedia.pub.