Announcements

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of a new functionality giving the possibility for researchers and scholars to endorse, and formally recommend articles to their colleagues.

MDPI was an early signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/read/) which calls for improvement in how quality and impact of scholarly research outputs are evaluated, especially in moving beyond journal-based citation metrics (journal Impact Factor, Scopus Citescore, etc.).

MDPI supports the establishment of article-level impact metrics, including citations, views, downloads, and Altmetric scores. These measures serve as an impact indicator for research articles on a case–by-case basis, assessing paper on its own merit. However, these metrics are also subjective and can give a biased picture of the article impact: they do not directly reflect the quality or the intrinsic scientific value of the article.

In our view, community engagement with publications based on community-driven metrics can help to overcome this limitation. We have therefore launched an option for scholars to endorse articles, indicating their own assessment of its content and making a recommendation to their community. This follows our implementation of the open source Hypothesis commenting tool, which has been available for all articles published by MDPI for over a year (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397). Both endorsement and commenting are available for all previously published and forthcoming MDPI articles.

In addition to potentially serving as a sustainable solution to article assessment, endorsements will help scientific communities to identify the most relevant articles, independently of the journal in which it was published.

The code for the endorsing functionality, which relies on DOIs and ORCIDs, will be made available on GitHub with an open source license.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, President and Founder
Dr. Franck Vazquez, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Martyn Rittman, Publishing Director

MDPI will be attending AGU Fall Meeting 2019 in San Francisco, USA, 9–13 December.

AGU Fall Meeting is the largest international Earth and space science meeting in the world. After two dynamic meetings in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., they return to the Moscone Centre in San Francisco.

This year’s meeting will prepare you for what’s ahead: rapid developments in our science, new approaches to observing our Earth and beyond, the introduction of new data streams, growing demand for accessible science, the expansion of convergent science, and more. AGU will celebrate the past and inspire the future by bringing together the people, the imagination, and the science that will ignite our next hundred years to make our planet safer, cleaner, and more sustainable.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Atmosphere
• Climate
• Geosciences
• Hydrology
• IJGI
• Resources
• Remote Sensing
• Water

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#1248). 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.agu.org/Fall-Meeting.

Encyclopedia is a free online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as provide a comprehensive record of scientific development. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to contact us via office@encyclopedia.pub.

MDPI will be attending the 35th Annual International Conference on Soils, Sediments, Water, and Energy in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, 21-24 October 2019.

The Annual Conference on Soils, Sediments, Water and Energy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has become the preeminent national conference in this important environmental area. The conference attracts 600-800 attendees annually which includes a wide variety of representation from state and federal agencies, military, industry (including railroad, petroleum, transportation, and utilities), environmental engineering, environmental consulting, and academia.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Applied Sciences
• Climate
• Energies
• Toxics
• Sustainability
• Water

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #B34). 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.aehsfoundation.org/Ecc-Exhibitor-Info.aspx

We are pleased to announce that Preprints has passed the milestone of 10,000 posted preprints. We are delighted to have reached this after just over three years of operation. Our congratulations and thanks go to our authors and advisory board who have supported growth of the platform and been crucial to its operation.

You can find further details at https://www.preprints.org/announcement/show/37.

Last week, the DeepGreen initiative in Germany started into an advanced test phase with the publishing partners S. Karger AG, SAGE Publishing, MDPI, Frontiers and De Gruyter, as well as 27 universities from all over Germany, from Hamburg University of Applied Sciences to University of Konstanz.

DeepGreen aims at lowering the barriers for open access publishing by automatically delivering metadata and full text publications from participating publishers to authorized repositories at German universities.

In preparation for a later live operation, the advanced test phase serves to gain experience with extensive data deliveries from publishers and also handling different repository software (including OPUS4, DSpace, EPrints, MyCoRe). DeepGreen thereby acts as a sophisticated platform, receiving articles published by authors affiliated with German universities and depositing these articles to respective university repositories, based on the affiliation metadata. For more information about DeepGreen: https://deepgreen.kobv.de

Karger AG has been a close cooperation partner of the DeepGreen consortium since 2016. S. Karger has more than 80 subscription-based and around 20 open access journals covering a wide spectrum in health science. DeepGreen will assign S. Karger articles to authorized institutions on the legal basis of German alliance and national licenses.

SAGE Publishing  was founded by Sara Miller McCune in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1,000 journals and over 600 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. SAGE Publishing has been a close cooperation partner of DeepGreen since 2016.

MDPI  is a scientific open access publisher and has been a partner of DeepGreen since 2017. MDPI comprises 205 peer-reviewed journals of various disciplines. All articles are published under a CC-BY license and are freely available without embargo period.

Frontiers  is a scientific open access publisher with 61 journals of over 600 academic disciplines. All articles are peer-reviewed and published freely available under CC-BY license.

De Gruyter  is an academic publisher with more than 700 subscription-based and open access journals of 29 disciplines. Articles provided by De Gruyter will be assigned to institutions with German alliance and national licenses.

There is promising communication with other publishers.

DeepGreen is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the consortium comprises six institutions: the Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg, Bavarian State Library, Bavarian Library Network, University Library of the Technische Universität Berlin, University Library of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Helmholtz Open Science Coordination Office at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

The University of Basel and the MDPI Sustainability Foundation are organizing the First Basel Sustainable Publishing Forum on 9th September 2019.

The aim of this event is to provide background and perspectives on Plan S to Learned Societies, which have to make well-informed decisions to transition their journals to Open Access (OA).

The BSPF will bring together several representatives of Learned societies, Plan S architects as well as representatives from various publishers and publishing platforms. After getting the big picture from cOAlition S, panel discussions will allow to better understand the diverse challenges that Learned societies are facing to transition their journals to OA as well as to identify sustainable, implementable and scalable solutions for successful Open Access transition.

For program details and registration, please follow the link below:
https://sciforum.net/conference/SustainableSolutionsToOpenAccess

In addition to MDPI journals who received updated CiteScores for 2018, the titles listed below were added in Scopus recently and therefore received a first CiteScore in May 2019, based on last year's citation activity in the database.

For almost all of the newly added MDPI titles, their CiteScore ranks in the upper 50% of the distribution (Q1 or Q2) in at least one of the research areas. The following titles rank in the top 25% cited journals based on CiteScore: Actuators; Biomedicines; Coatings; Cosmetics; Fermentation; Journal of Fungi; Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity; Nanomaterials; and Publications.

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

New CiteScore for MDPI Journals

MDPI will be attending the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE 2019), to be held in Manchester, UK, 26–29 June 2019.

EAERE (The European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists) is one of the largest and most prominent scientific associations worldwide in the field of environmental and resource economics. Its annual conference attracts up to 750 participants from academic institutions, the public sector, and private industry. There are participants from 80 countries in Europe and beyond, who conduct research, design policy and operate in the field of environmental and resource economics.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Sustainability

Energies

Climate

Water

Urban Science

Resources

Economies

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth # 5). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have regarding our journals and open access publishing. For more information about the conference, please visit http://www.eaere-conferences.org/index.php?p=124

We will attend the Japan Geoscience Union Meeting 2019 (JpGU 2019). It will be held at the Makuhari Messe, International Convention Complex in Chiba, Japan, on 26–30 May 2019, and will be organized by the Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU). JpGU is an academic union that encompasses all the Earth and planetary sciences disciplines and related fields, and has been organizing annual meetings since 2005. JpGU 2019 will cover a wide range of Earth and planetary sciences, including space and planetary sciences, atmospheric and hydrospheric sciences, human geosciences, solid Earth sciences, and biogeosciences. The JpGU annual meeting provides participants with a good opportunity to become familiar with cutting-edge research and unique approaches to research objects within their own special field as well as beyond. Representatives of the following open-access journals will attend:

Minerals

Geosciences

Water

Atmosphere

Remote Sensing

Resources

Education Sciences

Climate

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