Announcements

Drones (ISSN 2504-446X) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal, published quarterly online by MDPI, indexed in SCIE and Scopus. Drones is recruiting Editorial Board Members whose research interests are related to the science and technology of designing and applications of drones, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), and remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), etc. Scholars whose research interests are related to unmanned water/underwater drones and unmanned ground vehicles are also welcomed.

Please find more details at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/drones.

We already have some highly renowned experts on our Editorial Board, and we are looking for more excellent scholars in this field to join us. If you are interested in this position or know of any potential candidates you would like to recommend, please contact the Drones Editorial Office (drones@mdpi.com). 

The main responsibilities of Editorial Board Members are as follows: 

• Pre-screening submissions and making decisions on whether a manuscript should be accepted or rejected for processing, as well as suggesting additional reviewers if necessary;
• Acting as Guest Editor of a Special Issue in your particular field of expertise, or recommending potential topics and Guest Editors;
• Promoting Drones and increasing its visibility at related academic conferences;
• Advising on the journal’s development.

Benefits for Drones Editorial Board Members include the following:

• You can publish one paper per year free of charge;
• A recognition certificate as an Editorial Board Member of Drones;
• We may apply travel grants for conferences that you attend or organize;
• Additional sponsorships are offered by Drones for conferences that you organize.

We look forward to hearing from you. 

Drones Editorial Office

The journal Drones (ISSN 2504-446X) is recruiting Review Board Members. The main responsibility of the new Members of the Reviewer Board is to regularly provide timely high-quality reports on submitted manuscripts. The responsibilities of the reviewers are available at https://www.mdpi.com/reviewers

Drones (ISSN 2504-446X) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal, published quarterly online by MDPI, indexed in SCIE and Scopus. The journal focuses on the design and applications of drones, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), and remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), unmanned water/underwater drones and unmanned ground vehicles. Drones is indexed in SCIE and Scopus. The Aims and Scope of the journal can be found at Aims and Scope.

The benefits of joining the Reviewer Board of Drones are as follows:

1. The Drones Editorial Board will acknowledge all Reviewer Board (RB) Members in its annual reviewer list, to be published in the "Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Drones This Year” of the journal website;
2. The board will present special recognition certificates to "Exceptional Reviewer Board Members". Exceptional reviewers are those recommended by editors for special recognition due to their outstanding review work;
3. Reviewer Board Members may be presented with the possibility of joining the Editorial Board of the journal (subject to the approval of the Editor-in-Chief).

If you are interested in this role or if you have any recommendations, please feel free to contact us (drones@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

For more information about Drones, please visit the website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/drones

We are pleased to inform you that the journal Drones (ISSN 2504-446X) has been accepted for inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) in the Web of Science in March 2021. Drones has been publishing research on the design and applications of drones for more than four years.

At the same time, Drones is also covered in Scopus, where its first CiteScore will be received in June 2021.

The journal focuses on design and applications of drones, including unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), and Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), etc. Likewise, contributions based on unmanned water/underwater drones and unmanned ground vehicles are also welcomed.

To make the most of this opportunity, we would like to invite you to make submissions to Drones. If you have a paper on any topic within the scope of the journal, please feel free to submit here.

We look forward to working with you again in the future.

Drones Editorial Office

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)

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.

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.

Scopus, the abstract and citation database, has further expanded the coverage of research published at MDPI, accepting to include the journals listed in the below. Coverage in Scopus is going to offer more visibility to the work published in these journals.

Thank you to the authors, editors and reviewers involved, for turning these journals into venues for publishing original, state-of-the-art research!

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