Announcements

We are pleased to announce that 16 new scholars have recently been appointed Editorial Board Members of the journal Buildings (ISSN: 2075-5309):

Dr. Andy Wright (De Montfort University, UK);
Dr. John Mander (Texas A & M University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Chi-Ming Lai (National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan);
Prof. Antonio Michele Tralli (University of Ferrara, Italy);
Prof. Dr. Roberto Realfonzo (University of Salerno, Italy);
Dr. Baolong Wang (Tsinghua University, China);
Prof. Dr. Ruth Dalton (Lancaster University, UK);
Dr. Andrew Whyte (Curtin University, Australia);
Prof. Dr. Bo Yang (Chongqing University, China);
Dr. Nan Li (Tsinghua University, China);
Dr. Bo Xia (Queensland University of Technology, Australia);
Prof. Dr. Žiga Turk (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia);
Prof. Dr. Becky P.Y. Loo (The University of Hong Kong, China);
Dr. Frederic Bosche (University of Edinburgh, UK);
Prof. Dr. Christopher Yu-Hang Chao (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China);
Prof. Dr. You-Fu Yang (Dalian University of Technology, China).

We wish them every success in both their research and development of the journal.

Further details about the Editorial Board can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/buildings/editors.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Lucio Soibelman has been appointed Associate Editor of Buildings (ISSN: 2075-5309).

Prof. Dr. Soibelman obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees at the Civil Engineering Department of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He worked as a construction manager for 10 years before moving to the United States in 1993, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering Systems in 1998 at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1998, he started working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. In 2004, he moved to be an Associate Professor at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and in 2008, he was promoted to Professor. In January 2012, he joined the University of Southern California as the Chair of the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

During the last 25 years, he has focused his research on advanced data acquisition, management, visualization, and mining for the construction and operation of advanced infrastructure systems. He has published over 150 books, book chapters, journal papers, conference articles, and reports, and has performed research with funding from NSF (NSF career award and several other NSF grants), NASA, DOE, the US Army, NIST, IBM, Bosch, IDOT, and RedZone Robotics, among many other funding agencies. He is the former Chief Editor of the American Society of Civil Engineers Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering. In 2010, he received the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering Award; in 2011, he received the FIATECH Outstanding Researcher Celebration of Engineering & Technology Innovation, or CETI, Award; in 2013, he was elected an ASCE fellow; in 2016, he was appointed the USC Viterbi Dean Professor, received the ASCE Construction Institute Construction Management Award, and received the ASCE Richard R. Torrens Award in recognition of his contributions as Chief Editor of the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering. In 2019, he was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Construction.

His areas of interest are the use of information technology for economic development, information technology support for construction management, process integration during the development of large-scale engineering systems, information logistics, artificial intelligence, data mining, knowledge discovery, image reasoning, text mining, machine learning, advanced infrastructure systems, sensors, streaming data, and multi-reasoning mechanisms.

We are confident that Prof. Dr. Soibelman’s academic background will help us continue to raise the prestige and quality of Buildings. We look forward to his contributions to the journal. For more information about the Editorial Board, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/buildings/editors.

On July 22, 2021, Google Scholar published the latest Scholar Metrics for academic journals. Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309) achieved an H5 factor (H5-index) of 32, making it the leading journal in the Architecture category.

The Scholar Metrics rankings are based on published research data from the past five years, including publications between 2016 and 2020, and citations of all articles indexed by Google Scholar until July 2021. The ranking is based on the H5 factor, which means that Google Metrics provides authors with a faster and easier way to assess the popularity and impact of recent academic publications.

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

We are pleased to inform you that Buildings has received its first Impact Factor (IF) of 2.648. Buildings now ranks 32/66 (Q2) in the “Construction & Building Technology” category, and 61/136 (Q2) in the “Engineering, Civil” category.

We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to our authors, readers, reviewers, and Board Members. Your efforts are indispensable to the continued success of the journal, which we greatly appreciate and value!

MDPI will be attending the 2nd International Conference for Global Chinese Academia on Energy and Built Environment (CEBE 2021) in Chengdu, China, on 16–19 July 2021. The conference aims at establishing a worldwide platform for promoting global cooperation and innovative communications for ethnic Chinese around the globe, sharing cutting-edge achievements in the utilization of clean energy, the enhancement of energy efficiency via the built environment, and the improvement in environmental quality.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Energies
• Nanomaterials
• Buildings
• Atmosphere
• Clean Technologies
• Processes
• Materials
• Sustainability

If you are 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 the following link: http://www.cebe2021.com.

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 Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309) has received a new CiteScore of 4.2, which equals rank 8/138(Q1) in the “Architecture” Category, rank 38/185 (Q1) in “Building and Construction” Category and rank 77/318 (Q1) in “Civil and Structural Engineering” Category, according to Scopus data.

We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to all of the authors, reviewers, and editors who have contributed to the journal and enabled this next big step!

We are excited to welcome the following recognized researchers, who recently joined the Editorial Board of Buildings:

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)