Announcements

2018 was a great year for preprints, with increasing numbers of authors looking to make their papers available online before peer review. Along with other preprint servers, our platform Preprints.org  saw an increase in the uptake from authors, and more than double the number of announced papers compared to 2017. In fact, we recently passed two important milestones: 8000 preprints online and 30,000 authors. 

We believe that the whole research community has the opportunity to benefit from work being available online as early as possible. We thank and congratulate our authors for supporting us to make this goal a reality.

In 2019, we will be looking carefully at how to provide better value for authors, maintain efficiency while growing in size, and make sure we remain well-connected with the research community. 

If you want to participate, you can consider screening preprints or joining our advisory board. And, of course, posting your own work.

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our national Open Access agreement with the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Through this national agreement, the Austrian institutions listed below as well as FWF will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by eligible corresponding or funded authors in MDPI journals as long as central funds are available.

All participating institutions have gained access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Funder and Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency. At the same time eligible authors are benefited from an APC discount which comes at no cost for the institutions.

Eligible corresponding 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. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email address. To claim their discount, FWF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript. The institutions will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Eligible authors that have their APC covered by their institution or funder are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "Open Access Funding by the [name of the institution/funder]".

The full text of the agreement is openly available online at: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2536007

For any questions about the agreement, please contact the KEMÖ Consortium at emedien@obvsg.at, FWF at Katharina.Rieck@fwf.ac.at, or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

The Austrian institutions participating in this agreement are:

• Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
• University for Continuing Education Krems
• University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna
• University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien
• Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
• Institute of Science and Technology Austria
• MCI Management Center Innsbruck
• University of Graz
• University of Linz
• University of Salzburg
• Graz University of Technology
• TU Wien
• University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna
• University of Vienna

This is our first collective agreement with a national library consortium, while the individual institutions around the world participating in our IOAP are now more than 500 - see details here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap. We would be mostly interested in discussing about possible collaborations with other consortia, funders, and institutions in our mutual efforts to accelerate Open Access.

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.

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.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Gordon H. Huang has been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of Climate (ISSN 2225-1154; CODEN: CLIMC9).

Dr. Gordon Huang is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Environmental Systems Engineering, and Executive Director of the Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainable Communities at the University of Regina, Canada. He holds a BSc from Peking University (China), MSc from Simon Fraser University (Canada) and PhD from McMaster University (Canada).

Since the 1990s, Huang has led over 150 environment-related research projects, produced over 900 peer-refereed international journal papers, and supervised over 100 Master/PhD students. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the President of the International Society for Environmental Information Sciences. His pioneering work in environmental risk management has been recognized as a significant innovation, and has influenced government and business approaches to tackling environmental challenges and formulating related policies.

We warmly welcome Professor Gordon H. Huang as our Editor-in-Chief and look forward to his valuable input for the continued success of Climate.

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/