Announcements

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, starting from January 2021, the editorial leadership of Cryptography (ISSN 2410-387X) has been passed on to Prof. Dr. Josef Pieprzyk, who is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Data61 in Sydney, Australia.

The research interest of Professor Josef Pieprzyk focuses on cryptology and information security and includes design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms (such as encryption, hashing and digital signatures), secure multiparty computations, cryptographic protocols, copyright protection, e-commerce, web security and cybercrime prevention.

Professor Pieprzyk is a member of the editorial boards for several international journals. Additionally, he has published 5 and edited 10 books (conference proceedings published by Springer), 6 book chapters and more than 250 papers in refereed journals and refereed international conferences.

We warmly welcome Professor Josef Pieprzyk as our new Editor-in-Chief and look forward to his valuable input for the continued success of Cryptography. We would also like to take the opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to the previous Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Kwangjo Kim, for his invaluable contributions to the journal.

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.

Cryptography has been accepted to Scopus (Elsevier). Papers published in Cryptography from 2019 will be indexed by Scopus (high visibility), and we will receive the first CiteScore next summer.

Cryptography continues to be indexed by ESCI. Our aim is to encourage researchers to rapidly and effortlessly publish their new findings or concepts in an open access medium, overseen by their peers. In the first half of 2020, a first decision was provided to authors approximately 23.8 days after submission; and acceptance to publication was undertaken in 3.6 days.

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.

Cryptography (ISSN 2410-387X) is an ESCI-indexed open access journal led by Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Kwangjo Kim. We aim to provide a state-of-the-art forum for original results in all areas of modern cryptography.

We will extend the following benefits to reviewers:

- The Cryptography Editorial Board will acknowledge all Reviewer Board (RB) members in its annual reviewer list, to be published in the “Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Cryptography This Year” on the journal website.

- The board will present special certificates in recognition of “Exceptional Reviewer Board Members”. Exceptional reviewers are those recommended by Editors for special recognition based on their outstanding review work.

- Reviewers who provide timely, thorough peer review reports will receive a 50–100 CHF voucher for each review, based on the speed and quality of the review report. These vouchers can be used to cover the publication fees for papers published in all MDPI journals.

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

- Your submission to Cryptography will be granted a discount or waiver.

If you are interested in this position, please contact the Cryptography Editorial Office (cryptography@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

We are pleased to inform you that the journal Cryptography (ISSN  2410-387X) has recently been selected for inclusion in the Emerging Sources Citation Index—Web of Science (ESCI).

We thank all authors, reviewers, and editors who have contributed to Cryptography and made these achievements possible!

Cryptography Home: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/cryptography

Since 1996, MDPI has been committed to supporting the research community by providing the latest research freely available and making relevant and useful research available as quickly as possible. The world is current experiencing a pandemic of COVID-19, and researchers are working extremely hard to understand it and find a cure.

The values MDPI holds strongly are particularly important at the moment, and we will continue to publish relevant, peer-reviewed research as quickly as possible in open access format. This means that it will immediately be available for researchers, health professionals, and the general public to read, distribute, and reuse. We believe that scientific advancements will be crucial to overcoming this pandemic, and will do everything we can to support researchers working looking for solutions.

COVID-19 Academic Resources Center contains a variety of information related to COVID-19 available from MDPI, including journal articles, special issues, and preprints, among others.

For more information, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/covid-19