Announcements

The advantages of the open access model of scientific publishing are being increasingly recognized in the scientific community. It allows new scientific evidence to be accessed from the moment of publication for free by anyone around the globe, boosting the impact of new research. In response, many funders, libraries and universities have been adopting new principles to accelerate the transition to open access.

Recently, “transformative agreements” have been negotiated between traditional publishers and various institutions. While increasing the number of open access papers, these agreements lack binding commitments to a full transition to open access, their conditions vary across different regions, and access is still limited for many users.

MDPI is a co-signatory of the recent position statement raising concerns about potential downsides of transformative agreements and how they may delay a full transition to open access. The statement highlights that these models “risk perpetuating current limitations on access, transparency and market competitiveness, while simultaneously facilitating excessive charges on the public purse”.

As a pioneering open access journal publisher, MDPI is the first to promote the importance of science being made available to everyone. Our peer-reviewed journals, covering diverse academic disciplines, are fully accessible to the public free of charge under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). This is why, along with other open access publishers, MDPI is a proud signatory of the position paper and is committed to contributing to the replacement of weak transitional agreements with “agreements with publishers that are already fully committed to open science and who offer full, immediate and transparent Open Access”.

Read the position paper here

Crystals is recruiting Editorial Board Members for the following new sections:

Industrial Crystallization
Organic Crystalline Materials
Hybrid and Composite Crystalline Materials
Macromolecular Crystals
Minerals and Biominerals

Crystals (ISSN 2073-4352) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal that broadly covers Crystalline Materials, Liquid Crystals, Crystal Engineering, and Biomolecular Crystals. It is indexed in SCIE with an Impact Factor of 2.061.

As an Editorial Board Member, you would have the following responsibilities:

- Reviewing a couple of manuscripts per year;
- Editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research and making final decisions on submitted papers;
- Recommending timely topics and suggesting potential Guest Editors;
- Publishing one paper per year, free of charge, in open access format;
- Identifying appropriate conferences for editors to attend;
- Promoting the journal.

If you are interested in this position or have potential candidates to recommend, please reach out to us (crystals@mdpi.com) by 30 June 2020.

We are pleased to announce that Encyclopedia will be awarding five Outstanding Contributor Awards for researchers in 2020. The nominations and applications will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee consisting of senior scholars from the Encyclopedia Editorial Board.

Prize for Winners

1. An official certificate;
2. A cash award of 500 CHF or an MDPI discount voucher of 800 CHF.

Application Deadline

31 December, 2020 (Please send your application email with a list of all entries you contributed to our office before the deadline: office@encyclopedia.pub)

Candidate Requirements

1. Have a Ph.D. degree;
2. Have more than three qualified entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020.

Evaluation Standards

1. Number of entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020;
2. Quality of entries online (including length, figure quality, and novelty);
3. Impact of entries (including the number of likes, discussion contents, views, and downloads).

If you are a researcher and have not yet contribute entries to Encyclopedia, please do not miss this chance to highlight your research results.

We are pleased to announce that Crystals has passed the milestone of having published 2000 papers since its inception in 2011. Crystals (ISSN 2073-4352) is an open access journal published monthly online by MDPI that covers all aspects of crystalline material research, including liquid crystals and biomolecular crystals. It is now covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) and Scopus, with a 2018 Impact Factor of 2.061, which corresponds to the rank 12/26 (Q2) in Crystallography.

Our sincere thanks go to the Editor-in-Chief of Crystals, Prof. Dr. Helmut Cölfen, Section Editors-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Sławomir J. J. Grabowski, Prof. Abel Moreno, Prof. Dr. Charles Rosenblatt, and Prof. Dr. Shujun Zhang, and all the Editorial Board Members, as well as Guest Editors of Special Issues, who have ensured the continued success of the journal through their hard work and diligence. In addition, we also acknowledge the many valuable publications from our authors and important contribution of our dedicated reviewers. We wish to thank you all for your support, and hope to receive more quality submissions from you in the future.

Crystals is recruiting Editorial Board members for the following four sections:

• Crystalline Materials
• Crystal Engineering
• Liquid Crystals
• Biomolecular Crystals

The journal is looking to expand the Editorial Board and cover areas that are less well-represented by the current team. If you are interested in serving as an Academic Editor on the Editorial Board, or have potential candidates to recommend, please reach out to us by 31 December 2019.

Crystals (IF 2.061; ISSN 2073-4352) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal of crystallography. It enjoys high visibility, being covered by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE—Web of Science), Inspec (IET), and Scopus.

As an Editorial Board member, you have the following responsibilities:

- To make decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted, or not, based on the reports we collect;
- To serve as Editor of a Special Issue on a topic related to your research interests when it is convenient for you;
- Reviewing some manuscripts in your area of interest and when you are available;
- Recommending timely topics or appropriate conferences;
- Promoting Crystals and increasing its visibility at related academic conferences.

To apply or request further information, please contact the Crystals Editorial Office (crystals@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of SciProfiles, its social network platform for researchers and scholars.

The purpose of SciProfiles is aligned with MDPI’s broad mission to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and to serve scholars and communities by providing opportunities for academic networking.

SciProfiles also ambitions to serve as a sustainable, transparent and community-driven research evaluation system aligned with the DORA principles (https://sfdora.org/). Through their scientific profiles, academics can highlight their contribution to research communities, and measure their impact on their field, beyond publication numbers and impact factors. SciProfiles is currently a beta version and will enrich to give researchers the possibility to highlight all of their contributions to science and their scientific communities as authors, reviewers, editors, conference organizers, conference panelists, conference keynote speakers, or even as lecturers or student mentors at their University.

The classic components of popular community social networks, including follower/following, classical metrics, endorsements and recommendations (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1690), comments (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397) are or will be very soon highlighted in SciProfiles as open science contributions.

To help increase the impact and visibility of articles and their authors to an appropriate audience, the platform offers a NewsFeed that includes recommendations of relevant content based on interests, publication history, saved searches or colleagues’ recommendations.

SciProfiles’ avatars are now being integrated on several MDPI platforms, meaning that you will directly access researchers’ profiles from any of the MDPI platforms:

MDPI's journal publishing website: www.mdpi.com
MDPI's conference hosting and management website: www.sciforum.net
MDPI's pre-print website : www.preprints.org
MDPI's knowledge sharing website : www.encyclopedia.pub
MDPI's books store: www.mdpi.com/books
MDPI's literature database : www.scilit.com

SciProfiles aims to serve scientific communities at large. It can be embedded into third-party websites and also welcomes integration of data from third-parties.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/2
Dr. Franck Vazquez: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/FranckVazquez
Dr. Martyn Rittman: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/martynrittman

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 MDPI Writing Prize. Entrants were asked to write on the theme "Judging research: How should research and researchers be evaluated and rewarded?" We received a large number of excellent essays from PhD students and postdocs, and the process of shortlisting and choosing winners was not an easy one. The winners demonstrated excellent writing skills alongside interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

As last year, we will begin the process of collating all entries into a book that will be available in open access format. Alongside promoting good writing skills, we see the prize as a way to promote the voices of early career researchers within broader debates and policy discussions.

Congratulations to all of the participants and especially the winners. The winners are:

1st Prize (500 CHF):
Albin Nilsson (National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland)
[Read here]

2nd Prize (250 CHF):
Qi Zhang (Shandong University, Jinan, China)
[Read here]
Igor Ogashawara (Indiana University, Indianapolis, US)
[Read here]

3rd Prize (100 CHF):
Margaret Sivapragasam (Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Perak, Malaysia)
[Read here]
Arvind Sharma (The University of Queensland, Gatton, Australia)
[Read here]
Jose Flores-Guerrero (University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands)
[Read here]

The MDPI Writing Prize is an annual award supported by MDPI Author Services, which provides services including language editing, reformatting, plagiarism checks, and image editing.

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

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.