Announcements

Children (ISSN 2227-9067) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of pediatrics published monthly online by MDPI. The publication focuses on sharing clinical, epidemiological and translational science relevant to children’s health.

Children is expanding the Reviewer Board to cover areas that are less represented by the current team. As our Reviewer Board, we would like to invite you to help review papers within your research field.

Benefits for Children Reviewer Board include:

- RB members who provide timely, thorough, and rigorous peer-review reports will receive a voucher, which can be applied to their next publications in MDPI journals.

- You will have a chance to be nominated as the candidates of our Outstanding Reviewer Awards winner, which will receive 500 CHF, a certificate and a chance to publish a paper free of charge in Children.

- RB members may be presented with the possibility to join the Editorial Board of the journal (subject to the approval of the Editor-in-Chief).

- The Children Editorial Board will acknowledge all RB members in its annual reviewer list through a publication/announcement in the "Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Children" editorial on the journal website.

If you are interested in this position or know of potential candidates to recommend, please contact us by sending a short CV to the Children Editorial Office.

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)

We are pleased to announce that 21 new scholars were appointed as Topic Board Members for the journal of Children:

Dr. Malgorzata Wojcik（Jagiellonian University Medical College，Poland）

Prof. Katarzyna Wroblewska-Seniuk（Poznan University of Medical Sciences, Poznan, Poland）

Prof. Ranjit Philip（University of TennesseeLeBonheur Children's Hospital，USA）

Dr. Sebastian Acosta (Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, USA)

Dr. Ioannis Kyriakidis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

Dr. Anthony Herbert (Queensland Children's Hospital, Australia)

Dr. Jodi D. Stookey (San Francisco Department of Public Health, USA)

Dr. Filippo Fassio (Allergy & Clin Immunol UnitFLORENCE, ITALY)

Dr. Rashmi Bhandari (Stanford University Medical Center, USA)

Dr. Salima Punja (University of Alberta, Canada)

Dr. Guido Stichtenoth (University of Lübeck, Germany)

Dr. Francesca Parisi (University of Milan, Italy)

Dr. Vasu D. Gooty (LeBonheur Children’s Hospital, USA)

Dr. Ann Ming Yeh (Stanford University, USA)

Dr. Katherine S. Salamon (DuPont Hospital for Children, USA)

Dr. Hiroyuki Wakiguchi (Yamaguchi University Graduate School of Medicine,Japan)

Prof. Sue Ann S. Lee (Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, USA)

Dr. Bernhard Schwaberger (Medical University of Graz, Austria)

Dr. Satinder Dahiya (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, USA)

Dr. Lauren Heathcote (Stanford University School of Medicine, USA)

Dr. Raphael N. Vuille-dit-Bille (University Children’s Hospital of Basel, Switzerland)

We wish them every success in developing the journal.

 Further details about the Topics Board can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/children/topic_editors.

We are pleased to announce that 6 new scholars were appointed as Reviewer Board Members for the journal Children:

Dr. Sherri Castle (University of Oklahoma, USA)

Dr. Priyamvada Jayaprakash (The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA)

Dr. Alexandra Russell (Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, USA)

Dr. Bjoern Vogt (University Hospital Muenster, Germany)

Dr. Lukas P. Mileder (Medical University of Graz,  Austria)

Dr. Atika Khalaf (Kristianstad University, Sweden)

We wish them every success in developing the journal.

Further details about the Reviewer Board Members can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/children/submission_reviewers.

MDPI is proud to adopt the principles of the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) to support building equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications.

The C4DISC represents organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications and is focused on addressing issues of diversity and inclusion within the publishing industry.

MDPI’s Managing Editors encourage the Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, geographic location, sexual orientation, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and editors of MDPI journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.

Representatives from C4DISC meet monthly, and have started to implement initiatives to shed light and improve on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. Some of the initiatives include developing a joint statement of principles; conducting market research; providing training resources, best practices, toolkits, and documentation for our collective memberships; and establishing outreach programs, curricula, events, and publications.

The Coalition is committed to:

• eliminating barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination;
• creating and maintaining an environment that respects diverse traditions, heritages, and experiences;
• promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making;
• raising awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce;
• supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations.

At MDPI we have slightly revised the layout for articles to be published in the 2021 Volume, starting at the end of December 2020. As of today, the article templates available for download on ‘Instructions for Authors’ pages have been updated.

The most noticeable change can be found on the first page of the article, where a left-hand column has been created to include the following front matter elements: (i) the recommended citation style for the article, (ii) the publishing history, (iii) as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license used (iv) a standard note regarding affiliations. At the same time, the extra spacing on the left means the authors’ affiliations are now more clearly set apart than before. Other front matter key elements such as journal logo, article type, article title, authors, abstract and keywords remain unchanged.

The blank column on the left runs through all pages in an article; as a result, the main text is slightly more condensed, which improve reader friendliness for smaller screens. Small figures/tables are aligned on the left with standard indenture, while large figures/tables are centered and covering the full width of the page. The revised layout was applied in the article pictured below, to serve as an example:

1) Information is displayed in the left information bar.

2) In the main text, there is a blank column on the left.

3) Small tables/figures are aligned on the left, large tables/figures are centered.

We are pleased to acknowledge that many academic editors who have made an impact on MDPI journals as editorial board members, editors-in-chief, or section editors, are recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Highly Cited Researchers highlights the top 1% of researchers, by citations, in one or more of the 22 fields used in Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We offer our congratulations to 279 academic editors of MDPI journals who were recognized as the most influential scholars in their fields in 2020.

The full list of 2020 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed on https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2020/

--- Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) is a Clarivate product.

MDPI will be attending the conference Neuroscience 2020, which will be hosted in Washington, USA, 24–28 October 2020.

SfN’s 50th annual meeting is the premier venue for the presentation of emerging science in the field of neurosciences, where one can learn from experts, forge collaborations with peers, explore new tools and technologies, and advance their career.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Brain Sciences (leading journal)
• JCM
• Medicina
• Genes
• Children
• Cancers
• Behavioral Sciences
• Cells
• IJERPH
• Disease
• Biomedicines
• JPM
• Pathogens
• Healthcare
• IJMS
• Psych
• Pharmaceuticals
• Clocks&Sleep
• Jounal of Intelligence
• Pharmaceutics

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #208). 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.sfn.org/meetings/neuroscience-2020

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our Open Access agreement with Jisc Collections, which will allow UK institutions to benefit from access to article processing charge (APC) discounts and streamlined payment workflows.

All institutions participating in the agreement will also gain access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information for easy identification and additional transparency.

Eligible authors affiliated with the participating institutions are prompted to choose the corresponding Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system.

About Jisc

Jisc's vision is for the UK to be the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the world. At its heart is the super-fast national research and education network, Janet, with built-in cyber security protection.  Jisc also provides technology solutions for its members (colleges, universities and research centres) and customers (public sector bodies), helps members save time and money by negotiating sector-wide deals and provides advice and practical assistance on digital technology. Jisc is funded by the UK higher and further education and research funding bodies and member institutions.

For more information, contact helen.dobson@jisc.ac.uk.

About MDPI

MDPI is a publisher of fully peer-reviewed, Open Access journals with a focus on thorough and rapid editorial processing. Its aim is to ensure that high-quality research is verified and made available to the research community as quickly as possible. MDPI stands at the forefront of the Open Access movement, having launched its first online journal Molecules in 1996. Today, MDPI is a leader in Open Access publishing with over 250 journals across all research disciplines, and all content published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

For any questions about this agreement, please contact the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

The updated citation metrics have been released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), published by Clarivate. The recent release of the JCR includes seventy-one MDPI titles. Out of these, 18 titles are newcomers, receiving a first Journal Impact Factor which is based on citation activity in 2019: Actuators, Agriculture, Biology, Biomedicines, Biosensors, Chemosensors, Children, Healthcare, Journal of Fungi, Journal of Personalized Medicine (JPM), Land, Life, Magnetochemistry, Membranes, Pharmaceuticals, Photonics, Separations and Toxics.

• Out of the previously listed journals, a total of 72 percent boast an increased Impact Factor.
• 25 journals are ranked among the top 25% of journals in at least one of the categories they are ranked for.
• Articles published in 2019 in MDPI journals account for approximately 17 percent of of articles published in gold Open Access journals covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
  
  

First Impact Factors

Updated Impact Factors