Announcements

The 2022 citation metrics have been released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and we’re pleased to announce the following results for MDPI journals:

We are thrilled to announce that 90% of our ranked MDPI journals, specifically 86 out of 96 (captured in the table below), are performing above average in Q1 or Q2. This year, Clarivate has expanded its Impact Factor (IF) awards to include journals in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), providing greater transparency for the full set of journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection. As a result, 111 of MDPI journals have received their first IF in 2023, with 37 journals surpassing an IF of 3.0. In total, 208 MDPI journals have been honored with an IF.

Clarivate explains that by "expanding the coverage but holding to highly selective standards, the [Impact Factor] is now a reliable indicator of trustworthiness, as well as a measure of scholarly impact, at the journal level."

Please visit our blog post where we discuss the release of the latest citation metrics with our Indexing Manager, Dr. Constanze Schelhorn, to find out what's different this time around and how to make use of different metrics available.

Note: The Journal of Personalized Medicine's Impact Factor was omitted in the original release and will be assigned separately. Please find the data on the journal webpage in due course.

Source: 2022 Journal Impact Factors, Journal Citation Reports ^TM (Clarivate, 2023)

Conference: XXII EuroFoodChem Congress
Date: 14–16 June 2023
Place: Belgrade, Serbia

MDPI will be attending the XXII EuroFoodChem Congress, which will be held from 14 to 16 June 2023 in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade.

This important international conference in the field of food chemistry is organized by the Food Chemistry Division of EuChemS and the Serbian Chemical Society, with support from the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. It will cover the major scientific themes of food composition, quality, and safety; food sustainability, including byproducts’ valorization; novel foods; food and health, functional foods and ingredients; chemical reactions and interactions of food components; chemical changes in food under processing and storage; food adulteration, authenticity, and traceability; novel methods for food chemistry; and food contaminants. In addition to abstract presentations and lectures by world-renowned speakers, this conference will offer a variety of networking options. EuroFoodChem is an excellent opportunity for initiating or strengthening cooperation and knowledge.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Foods;
• Antioxidants;
• Dairy;
• Nutraceuticals;
• Sustainability;
• CIMB;
• Beverages;
• BioChem;
• Hygiene;
• AppliedChem.

Please do not hesitate to reach out (foods@mdpi.com) if you plan on attending this conference. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions that you might have.

For more information about the conference, please visit the following website: https://xxiieurofoodchem.com/.

To commemorate the International Day for Biological Diversity 2023, MDPI is launching a special webinar to encourage researchers to come together, take action, and highlight how the exchange of findings facilitates efforts to raise awareness of all life.

Biological diversity is often understood in terms of the wide variety of plants, animals, and microorganisms. We aim to encourage connection and collaboration among biological scientists and the international open access community to share and show support for biodiversity.

The webinar aims to encourage connections and collaboration among biological researchers and the international open access community to share and celebrate the role biological diversity plays in our lives.

We are very much looking forward to seeing you at the MDPI International Day for Biological Diversity Webinar 2023.

Conference secretariat: Ms. Shun Li
Date and time: 22 May 2023, 9:00 a.m. CEST

Register now for free!

This is a free webinar. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information on how to join the webinar. Registrations with academic institutional email addresses will be prioritized.

Unable to attend? Register anyway and we will let you know when the recording is available to watch. 

Keynote Speakers:

• Prof. Dr. Luca Sebastiani, Crop Science Research Centre – Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies – Pisa, Italy;
• Dr. P. C. Abhilash, Institute of Environment & Sustainable Development, Banaras Hindu University, India;
• Dr. Vittorio Capozzi, Department of Agricultural, University of Foggia, Italy.

Program

 Relevant Special Issues:

Agronomy 
"Wild Crop Relatives and Associated Biocultural and Traditional Agronomic Practices for Food and Nutritional Security"
Edited by: Purushothaman Chirakkuzhyil Abhilash, Ajeet Singh,Rama Kant Dubey, Hailin Zhang and Othmane Merah
Submission deadline: 23 June 2023 

Insects
"Pollinator Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services"
Edited by: Daniele Sommaggio and María Pérez-Marcos
Submission deadline: 30 September 2023

"Arthropod Trophic Associations in Natural, Urban, Agricultural, Aquatic and Forest Ecosystems: Destabilizing Agent"
Edited by: Erifili P. Nika and Nickolas G. Kavallieratos
Submission deadline: 31 December 2023

Forests
"Wildlife in Forest Habitats"
Edited by: Jakub Borkowski
Submission deadline: 10 July 2023

"Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Forests"
Edited by: Margarita Arianoutsou, Nikolaos Fyllas and Josep Peñuelas
Submission deadline: 5 August 2023

Land
"Feature Papers for Land, Biodiversity, and Human Wellbeing Section"
Edited by: Sean Sloan, Andrea Belgrano and Stephen Blake
Submission deadline: 5 July 2023

"Perspective on Habitat Degradation, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, and Landscape Change"
Edited by: Vanessa Adams
Submission deadline: 26 September 2023

Water
"Biodiversity and Functionality of Plankton Communities"
Edited by: Natalia Kuczyńska-Kippen and Maria Špoljar
Submission deadline: 30 June 2023

"Impacts of Human Activities and Climate Change on Freshwater Fish, Volume II"
Edited by: Pietro Volta, Erik Jeppesen, Vanessa De Santis and Mustafa Korkmaz
Submission deadline: 25 September 2023

JoF
"Fungal Biodiversity and Ecology, 3rd Edition"
Edited by: Lei Cai
Submission deadline: 1 September 2023

"Macromycetes of the Northern Hemisphere: Phylogeny, Taxonomy, Diversity, Distribution, Ecology, Conservation"
Edited by: Vladimír Antonín
Submission deadline: 20 August 2023

As a leading open access publisher, MDPI provides scholars with a high-quality and rich academic exchange platform by continuously expanding into new and exciting research areas.

In December 2022, MDPI launched five new journals, covering multiple subjects such as life sciences, biology, medicine and pharmacology, social sciences and humanities. These new journals are being edited by established scholars across the world.

If you are interested in creating more open access journals with us to publish cutting-edge research, please send your journal proposal application to newjournal-committee@mdpi.com.

MDPI is pleased to announce that we now display the co-authors’ email addresses in addition to the corresponding author’s email address on the webpage of published papers, protected by Captcha. For more information about this change, please visit the journal’s instructions for authors page. 

We believe this change will facilitate academic discussions and advance our cause of open science and research. The corresponding authors are responsible for communicating with their co-authors and indicating in our system (https://susy.mdpi.com/) if co-authors would prefer for their email addresses not to be displayed.

On 9 February 2023, Clarivate, a global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics, added the Preprint Citation Index to the Web of Science platform, streamlining the research process by allowing researchers to locate and link to preprints alongside other trusted content in the database.

The Preprint Citation Index will act as a bridge to connect cutting-edge preprints with peer-reviewed journal articles published within the Web of Science Core Collection. Alerts can be easily set to monitor new research across several repositories and authors will also be able to include preprints on their Web of Science Research Profile to more accurately display their various research outputs.

As of its launch, the Preprint Citation Index will provide nearly two million preprints from various repositories, including MDPI’s own Preprints.org.

MDPI's Preprints Platform – Preprints.org

To advance Open Science and the fast dissemination of research, MDPI offers researchers a free multidisciplinary preprint platform. Preprints.org accepts submissions from all research areas and offers authors high visibility, permanent archiving, article-level Metrics and immediately citable content by assigning a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to all preprints.

During submission to any MDPI journal, authors have the option to share their research as a preprint. After an initial screening, the manuscript is available online in 48 hours or less. Once online, preprints can be downloaded, shared, commented on, and cited, providing authors maximum visibility.

We invite you to join the ranks of the over 100k researchers using Preprints.org and share your research.

For more information, please visit Preprints.org.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative—the MDPI Special Issue Mentor Program.

This program will enable early career researchers (who must hold a Ph.D. in a related field) to experience editing a Special Issue in MDPI journals, under the mentorship of our experienced Editorial Board Members or other experienced scientists. The mentor program will provide an excellent opportunity for early career scientists to gain editorial experience, and to cultivate their ability to edit scientific research.

The mentee’s responsibilities include:

• Proposing a Special Issue title and assisting the mentor in preparing a summary (around 200–400 words) and 3–10 keywords describing the background, importance, and goal of the Issue;
• Writing a brief promotion plan for the Special Issue;
• Preparing a list of scholars who may be interested in the Issue and personally e-mailing invitations on behalf of Guest Editors;
• Writing an editorial for the online Special Issue together with the mentor.

The mentor’s responsibilities include:

• Conducting a final check before the Special Issue is published online;
• Performing editorial control of the Special Issue and quality control of the publications, both of which must be carried out in a timely manner;
• Providing suggestions to younger scholars if they have any doubts or concerns regarding submissions;
• Organizing video calls with young scholars and the Editorial Office regularly to discuss problems and improvement suggestions for the Special Issue;
• Making and submitting decisions regarding submissions with the assistance of mentees.

Certificates and awards:
After the Special Issue closes, the Editorial Office will provide official certificates for all the mentors and early career researchers.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your Special Issue proposal to the Editorial Office of a journal you choose, and we will discuss the process (i.e., mentor collaboration, Special Issue topic feasibility analysis, etc.) in further detail. The full list of MDPI journals is as follows: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals.

In addition to the new Special Issue Mentor Program, we will continue to welcome all Special Issue proposals focusing on hot research topics.

MDPI has just become the first open access (OA) publisher to reach the milestone of one million articles published. That is one million articles freely available to all, to circulate and build upon! We are proud to share this special moment with the global scientific community.

This landmark has been reached thanks to the immeasurable support of more than 600,000 expert reviewers, 66,000 editorial board members and 6700 hard-working colleagues across MDPI’s global offices.

Within more than 25 years of publishing, our journals received 2.1 million manuscripts and generated 4.6 million peer review reports to get to one million papers published.

Reaching the milestone of one million articles published reinforces our mission to remove any existing barriers and to make scientific research accessible to all. Since its inception, MDPI’s goal has been to create reliable processes to make science open. This is a path towards facilitating the dissemination of novel insights in scientific communities.

Regular feedback from authors and reviewers shows that our service is greatly appreciated and needed. At the same time, the feedback helps us identify areas for further improvement.

As it stands, a significant share of published research findings remain closed access. More than half of the content published with the most well-known legacy publishers stays behind a paywall, and that is not including articles published in hybrid OA journals, or made available months or years after publication.

A new policy announced by the US administration in August 2022 requires that, as of January 2026, all US federally funded research be made freely and immediately available after publication. While the new policy does not mandate articles be published under an open access license, it is aligned with the open access movement in removing all barriers to research. Similarly, some of the most advanced research institutions in the world intend to have all funded research articles published in open access by 2025.

MDPI is proud to be the leading agent of the transition to open access.

"Thanks a Million" to all the contributors!

We are pleased to announce that the website of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation has been revamped! For the past couple of months, our UX UI team and front-end developers have been working hard to launch the website in time for the opening of the Sustainability Awards nominations.

The website is not the only thing that has had a remodeling. Indeed, the format of the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award (ESLA) has been updated. ESLA is now a competition open to individual researchers or start-ups founded by researchers under the age of 35. Nominee applications will go through 2 rounds of selection until the final 3 are decided. The finalists will then be invited to give pitch presentations during the Award Ceremony to win either first place (10,000 USD) or runner-up (2 x 5000 USD).

The World Sustainability Award, on the other hand, remains the same: a total prize money of 100,000 USD is up for grabs by senior individual researchers or groups of researchers from the international research community.

Nominations for both the World Sustainability Award and the Emerging Sustainability Leader award are now open! Check out our new website for more information on how to nominate.

Peer Review Week began 19 September 2022 under the theme of “Research Integrity: Creating and Supporting Trust in Research”. Through various blog articles, podcast, and webinar, we discussed this crucial subject throughout the week, celebrating the essential role peer review plays in maintaining research quality.

To begin, we held a Webinar on the topic. Professor Peter W. Choate and Dr. Emmanuel Obeng-Gyasi joined Dr. Ioana Craciun, one of MDPI’s scientific officers, for an in-depth discussion.

We invite you to view the event recording:

During the week, the MDPI Blog in a series articles highlighted how good Peer Review safeguards research integrity. The following topics were covered:

• Peer Review Week 2022
• Research Integrity
• What We’ve Learned About Peer Review Reports
• 4 Steps to the Perfect Peer Review Report
• How to Write the Perfect Peer Review Report: An Interview
• Inviting Great Peer Reviewers

In a new edition of Insight Faster, an MDPI podcast, we were delighted to talk to the co-chairs of the Peer Review Week committee, Jayashree Rajagopalan (Senior Manager of Global Community Engagement for CACTUS) and Danielle Padula (Head of Marketing and Community Development at Scholastica) to get their take on this year’s event and its related topics.

You can find the Podcast here.

We hope you enjoy the contents!