Announcements

We are pleased to announce the new platform Encyclopedia, which is an online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as providing benchmark information for researchers and the general public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge on specific topics.

We encourage authors of review articles to quote and adapt the content of their published papers to create Encyclopedia entries. You can create completely new entries on topics in which you have knowledge and expertise. There is no limit on the topics or research fields. All of science and the humanities are included. Each entry will be published directly after submission.

We also have prepared a DOI application function in Encyclopedia. Once a DOI application is approved, the entry website will announce the DOI number and a pdf version with DOI information will be automatically created.

We look forward to your contributions and hope you will make use of this service. Find more about the service at: https://encyclopedia.pub/

MDPI will be attending the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting 2018, to be held in Birmingham, UK, 16–19 December 2018.

Over the last 40 years, the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting has grown into Europe’s largest and most influential annual event dedicated to ecology. In 2018, the British Ecological Society staging the Annual Meeting at the ICC in the heart of Birmingham. From 16–19 December 2018, 1600 ecologists—many of them world leaders in their field—representing business, academia, professional bodies, and NGOs from across the world, will converge in the United Kingdom’s second largest city for #BES2018.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Sustainability
Forests
Land
Climate
Life
Challenges

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Stand #F). 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://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/events/bes2018/.

We are delighted to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now a participant of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). Authors funded by the BMGF can enjoy discounts on the APC, while the funder covers the costs of eligible articles centrally. BMGF also has access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency.

We hope that funded authors find the programme beneficial and we are happy to offer our IOAP to other funders that need a streamlined workflow of compliance checking and APC coverage. 

To claim their discount, BMGF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript.

For any questions about the BMGF agreement, please contact the funder at support@chronos-oa.com or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.

We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.

Our editors will be attending the 2018 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW 2018), to be held in Guangzhou, China, on 25–29 November 2018.

ITW 2018 solicits and welcomes original contributions on the frontiers of information theory, coding theory and their applications, as well as the frontiers with other fields of study such as data science, biology and signal processing. The conference structure consists of a daily plenary seminar followed by two parallel paper sessions throughout the day.

The following four MDPI journals will be represented:

Entropy
Information
Challenges
Cryptography

We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".

For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at openaccess@qnl.qa.

MDPI will be attending the UDM 2018 (11th International Conference on Urban Drainage Modelling), to be held in Palermo, Italy, 23–26 September 2018.

On behalf of the organizing committee we would like to invite you to Palermo (Italy) for the 11th International Conference on Urban Drainage Modelling (UDM). The conference has been running since 1986 and in 2018 will be held the 11th edition, a monumental achievement of the urban drainage community. In 2018 we will be meeting in Europe once again. The UDM Conference deals with the main and advanced topics related to modelling the urban drainage system (e.g., water quality and quantity, urban flooding and modelling, urban flood forecasting and risk analysis, socio-economic interactions and modelling tools, etc.) by focusing the attention on the interrelationships among the entire water cycle, environment and society. The UDM seeks to create a forum for promoting the discussion amongst scientists, professionals and academia on urban drainage thus providing to women and men of this field decisive ideas.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Water
• Infrastructures
• Climate
• Challenges
• Urban Science
• Membranes

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth#8). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may hace. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.udm2018.org/

The 2017 CiteScore™ data is available now, based on citation data in the Scopus® database. The current CiteScore reflects citation activity in 2017 for articles published in 2014‒2016. Please note that the list below includes journals assigned a CiteScore in this year’s release. For a full list of journals indexed in Scopus, please see our journal list.

Thirteen of our journals received a CiteScore which is in the top 10% of the distribution in at least one of the categories (marked with * in the table below), while a further 32 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

Unlike CiteScores and the widely used Journal Impact Factors, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metrics are normalized in order to correct for differences in citation practices between scientific fields. Therefore, the SNIP allows direct comparison between journals specialized in different fields.

According to 2017 data, MDPI publishes six journals with an average citation impact, or SNIP, in excess of 1.500. These journals are Biomolecules, Cancers, Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM), Marine Drugs, Remote Sensing and Sensors (see the last column in the table below).

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

In April 2018, the inVIVO Planetary Health Network (formerly inFLAME Global Network) chose Challenges as its preferred journal and became an affiliated society member of the journal.

As part of this collaboration, once there is an article processing charge (APC), all affiliated SFET members will enjoy a discount on the APC when submitting articles to Challenges. inVIVO Planetary Health is a diverse group of scientists, clinicians, educators and advocates from many fields, who recognize the importance of approaching complex environmental issues from a holistic and integrated perspective—extending and combining the typical focus on the biological and psychological level with the wider sociological and environmental determinants of human health—and understanding how these are inter-related to societal health. This initiative provides both the impetus for a series of specific projects and an umbrella framework to integrate these in a unique way.