Announcements

MDPI will be attending the 18th International Conference on Waste Management and Technology (ICWMT18), held in Sanya, China, from 20 to 23 May 2023. The theme of this year’s conference is “Synergizing the Reduction of Pollution and Carbon Emission”. Throughout the conference, prominent researchers and government officials will give keynote speeches on pressing issues of solid waste management. ICWMT18 provides an excellent opportunity for participants from industry and academia to keep up to date with the latest trends in solid waste management.

During this conference, MDPI will welcome researchers from different backgrounds to visit and share their latest views as well as research with us.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Sustainability;
• Environments;
• Atmosphere;
• Buildings;
• Resources;
• Smart Cities;
• Sustainable Chemistry;
• Pollutants;
• Microplastics.

If you are attending this conference, please stop by our booth. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions that you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit the following link: http://www.bcrc.cn/icwmt-eng/.

Infrared thermography (IRT) has been increasingly used in the past decades to assess defects and the energy performance of buildings. Despite all the opportunities it presents for a better diagnosis, its use still mainly relies on a qualitative and more superficial evaluation of the results. However, there has been an attempt to implement quantitative interpretation methodologies, which guarantee more reliable analyses. However, some issues remain a challenge for the technical and scientific community, which drives a deep reflection both on the test procedures and on the methodologies to interpret the results clearly. This webinar aims at stimulating the exchange of ideas and knowledge on the application of IRT for buildings diagnostics.

Date: 30 May 2023 at 10:00 a.m. CEST | 4:00 a.m. EDT | 4:00 p.m. CST Asia

Webinar ID: 857 2118 6971

Register now for free!

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information on how to join the webinar. Registrations with academic institutional email addresses will be prioritized.

Can’t attend? Register anyway and we’ll let you know when the recording is available to watch.

Webinar Chair and Keynote Speakers:

• Dr. Eva Barreira, CONSTRUCT, Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering (FEUP), University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
• Dr. Blanca Tejedor, Department of Projects and Construction Engineering, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain
• Dr. Ivan Garrido, National Defense University Center, Naval Military Academy, Pontevedra, Spain
• Dr. Ricardo Almeida, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Department of Civil Engineering, Campus Politécnico de Repeses, Viseu, Portugal

As a leading open access publisher, MDPI provides scholars with a high-quality and rich academic exchange platform by continuously expanding into new and exciting research areas.

In December 2022, MDPI launched five new journals, covering multiple subjects such as life sciences, biology, medicine and pharmacology, social sciences and humanities. These new journals are being edited by established scholars across the world.

If you are interested in creating more open access journals with us to publish cutting-edge research, please send your journal proposal application to newjournal-committee@mdpi.com.

MDPI is pleased to announce that we now display the co-authors’ email addresses in addition to the corresponding author’s email address on the webpage of published papers, protected by Captcha. For more information about this change, please visit the journal’s instructions for authors page. 

We believe this change will facilitate academic discussions and advance our cause of open science and research. The corresponding authors are responsible for communicating with their co-authors and indicating in our system (https://susy.mdpi.com/) if co-authors would prefer for their email addresses not to be displayed.

On 9 February 2023, Clarivate, a global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics, added the Preprint Citation Index to the Web of Science platform, streamlining the research process by allowing researchers to locate and link to preprints alongside other trusted content in the database.

The Preprint Citation Index will act as a bridge to connect cutting-edge preprints with peer-reviewed journal articles published within the Web of Science Core Collection. Alerts can be easily set to monitor new research across several repositories and authors will also be able to include preprints on their Web of Science Research Profile to more accurately display their various research outputs.

As of its launch, the Preprint Citation Index will provide nearly two million preprints from various repositories, including MDPI’s own Preprints.org.

MDPI's Preprints Platform – Preprints.org

To advance Open Science and the fast dissemination of research, MDPI offers researchers a free multidisciplinary preprint platform. Preprints.org accepts submissions from all research areas and offers authors high visibility, permanent archiving, article-level Metrics and immediately citable content by assigning a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to all preprints.

During submission to any MDPI journal, authors have the option to share their research as a preprint. After an initial screening, the manuscript is available online in 48 hours or less. Once online, preprints can be downloaded, shared, commented on, and cited, providing authors maximum visibility.

We invite you to join the ranks of the over 100k researchers using Preprints.org and share your research.

For more information, please visit Preprints.org.

Peer review is an essential part of the publication process and is important in ensuring that Buildings (ISSN: 2075-5309) maintains high-quality standards for its published papers. The Buildings Editorial Board and editorial team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy dedicated by reviewers to checking the manuscripts submitted to the journal.

The following reviewers have been selected to receive the 2022 Buildings Outstanding Reviewer Awards based on the quantity, timeliness, and quality of their reviews in Buildings. The winners will each receive CHF 500, the privilege of publishing a paper free of charge in Buildings in 2023, and a certificate in recognition of their outstanding work.

Dr. Paolo Blecich, Associate Professor, Faculty of Engineering, University of Rijeka, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia

Dr. Blecich holds a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering. He serves as an Associate Professor of Thermodynamics and Thermal Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He is also Head of the Laboratory for Thermal Measurements. He teaches undergraduate and graduate-level classes of Thermodynamics, Gas Engineering, Renewable Energy, and Thermal Measurements. His scientific efforts are focused on the fields of heat and mass transfer, buildings energy analysis, energy efficiency, and energy conversion and management.

Dr. Łukasz Ścislo, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cracow University of Technology, 31-155 Cracow, Poland

Dr. Ścislo holds a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering. He serves as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cracow University of Technology, Cracow, Poland. Between 2018 and 2021, he worked as a Vibration Expert Engineer at the Mechanical Measurement Laboratory at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), where he was connecting his theoretical knowledge and numerical analysis experience with practical skills in numerous high-tech projects regarding vibration measurements and analysis, seismic measurements, and sensor development. His current scientific interests include noise and vibration measurement and suppression techniques, smart structures, sensing technologies, structural health monitoring, and fault diagnosis.

The articles below have been selected as 2022 Issue Cover Articles by the Editorial Office of Buildings (ISSN: 2075-5309). These articles came from multiple fields within the scope of Buildings. We hope that they can provide insights and references for scholars in these fields.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative—the MDPI Special Issue Mentor Program.

This program will enable early career researchers (who must hold a Ph.D. in a related field) to experience editing a Special Issue in MDPI journals, under the mentorship of our experienced Editorial Board Members or other experienced scientists. The mentor program will provide an excellent opportunity for early career scientists to gain editorial experience, and to cultivate their ability to edit scientific research.

The mentee’s responsibilities include:

• Proposing a Special Issue title and assisting the mentor in preparing a summary (around 200–400 words) and 3–10 keywords describing the background, importance, and goal of the Issue;
• Writing a brief promotion plan for the Special Issue;
• Preparing a list of scholars who may be interested in the Issue and personally e-mailing invitations on behalf of Guest Editors;
• Writing an editorial for the online Special Issue together with the mentor.

The mentor’s responsibilities include:

• Conducting a final check before the Special Issue is published online;
• Performing editorial control of the Special Issue and quality control of the publications, both of which must be carried out in a timely manner;
• Providing suggestions to younger scholars if they have any doubts or concerns regarding submissions;
• Organizing video calls with young scholars and the Editorial Office regularly to discuss problems and improvement suggestions for the Special Issue;
• Making and submitting decisions regarding submissions with the assistance of mentees.

Certificates and awards:
After the Special Issue closes, the Editorial Office will provide official certificates for all the mentors and early career researchers.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your Special Issue proposal to the Editorial Office of a journal you choose, and we will discuss the process (i.e., mentor collaboration, Special Issue topic feasibility analysis, etc.) in further detail. The full list of MDPI journals is as follows: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals.

In addition to the new Special Issue Mentor Program, we will continue to welcome all Special Issue proposals focusing on hot research topics.

MDPI has just become the first open access (OA) publisher to reach the milestone of one million articles published. That is one million articles freely available to all, to circulate and build upon! We are proud to share this special moment with the global scientific community.

This landmark has been reached thanks to the immeasurable support of more than 600,000 expert reviewers, 66,000 editorial board members and 6700 hard-working colleagues across MDPI’s global offices.

Within more than 25 years of publishing, our journals received 2.1 million manuscripts and generated 4.6 million peer review reports to get to one million papers published.

Reaching the milestone of one million articles published reinforces our mission to remove any existing barriers and to make scientific research accessible to all. Since its inception, MDPI’s goal has been to create reliable processes to make science open. This is a path towards facilitating the dissemination of novel insights in scientific communities.

Regular feedback from authors and reviewers shows that our service is greatly appreciated and needed. At the same time, the feedback helps us identify areas for further improvement.

As it stands, a significant share of published research findings remain closed access. More than half of the content published with the most well-known legacy publishers stays behind a paywall, and that is not including articles published in hybrid OA journals, or made available months or years after publication.

A new policy announced by the US administration in August 2022 requires that, as of January 2026, all US federally funded research be made freely and immediately available after publication. While the new policy does not mandate articles be published under an open access license, it is aligned with the open access movement in removing all barriers to research. Similarly, some of the most advanced research institutions in the world intend to have all funded research articles published in open access by 2025.

MDPI is proud to be the leading agent of the transition to open access.

"Thanks a Million" to all the contributors!

We are pleased to announce that the website of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation has been revamped! For the past couple of months, our UX UI team and front-end developers have been working hard to launch the website in time for the opening of the Sustainability Awards nominations.

The website is not the only thing that has had a remodeling. Indeed, the format of the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award (ESLA) has been updated. ESLA is now a competition open to individual researchers or start-ups founded by researchers under the age of 35. Nominee applications will go through 2 rounds of selection until the final 3 are decided. The finalists will then be invited to give pitch presentations during the Award Ceremony to win either first place (10,000 USD) or runner-up (2 x 5000 USD).

The World Sustainability Award, on the other hand, remains the same: a total prize money of 100,000 USD is up for grabs by senior individual researchers or groups of researchers from the international research community.

Nominations for both the World Sustainability Award and the Emerging Sustainability Leader award are now open! Check out our new website for more information on how to nominate.