Announcements

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

MDPI will be attending the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco, USA, 7–11 December 2019

IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is the world’s preeminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and device modeling and simulation.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Electronics
• JSAN
• Energies
• Micromachines
• Sensors
• Biosensors

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth. 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://ieee-iedm.org/.

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.

The 15th International Conference on Space, Aeronautical and Navigational Electronics 2019 (ICSANE2019) will be held in Korea for the fourth time, at Jeju University, Jeju, Korea, from 31st October to 1st November 2019. In addition, ICSANE2019 will be jointly held with the KAGIS (Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies) fall meeting.

This conference will offer numerous opportunities for oral presentations, posters, and publications. The system engineers and researchers are invited to present their works covering the full range of practice, development, and research experiences that advance the practice and theory of new and viable technical topics of electronics system in spacecraft, aircraft, ships, and ground facilities for citizens, government, and industry.

Topic areas include but are not limited to:

(1)    Satellite and Space Station Systems
(2)    Remote Sensing and Scientific Observation Technology
(3)    Radar Systems and Applications
(4)    Navigational and Communication Systems
(5)    Spatial Information Technology
(6)    Inverse Scattering Problem

The authors of the papers which will be presented at ICSANE2019 are invited to submit the related article to the co-operative Special Issue “Recent Advances in Space & Sensor Technologies and Remote Sensing Applications” in Electronics. There are no page limitations for this journal, and the submitted manuscript and its contents should not have been previously published and should be significantly independent in comparison with the ICSANE conference paper.

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.

We are pleased to announce Dr. Hirokazu Kobayashi was appointed Section Editor-in-Chief for the section "Microwave and Wireless Communications" in Electronics.

Hirokazu Kobayashi graduated with a Master’s degree of Electrical Engineering from Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu, Japan, in 1980 and received his Doctorate in Engineering from the University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan, in 2000.

He joined Fujitsu Ltd., Kawasaki, Japan, and worked with the Fujitsu System Integration Laboratories as a researcher on Space and Defense Division, where he developed micro/millimeter wave wide band antennas, active phased array radar systems, antennas, and theoretical investigation of electromagnetic scattering. From 1999 to 2010, he was a General Manager at Fujitsu Ltd. In 2010, he joined the Faculty of Engineering as a Professor with Niigata University, Niigata, Japan. Since 2013, he has been a professor in the Department of Electronics and Information Systems Engineering, Osaka Institute of Technology, Osaka, Japan.

Dr. Kobayashi's current research interests include high-frequency electromagnetics scattering theory, computing of radar cross-section (RCS) using physical optics, physical theory of diffraction and geometrical theory of diffraction (PO/PTD/GTD), RCS near-field to far-field transformation technology for electrical large object such as airplanes based on microwave radar imaging theory, radar SAR and ISAR imaging, radiation analysis such as conformal array, and target recognizing analysis by micro-Doppler information.

Dr. Kobayashi has published around two hundred papers, including conference papers, and three books. He was a Senior Member of IEEE, a Chair of Technical Committee on Space, Aeronautical and Navigational Electronics (SANE) of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) in 2015-2016. He also served as a member or chair of the steering committee/TPC of many international and local conferences.

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

We are pleased to announce that Professor Dr. Hamid Reza Karimi has been appointed Section Editor-in-Chief for the section "Systems & Control Engineering" of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). His term started in July 2019.

Hamid Reza Karimi (M’06–SM’09), born in 1976, received his B.Sc. (First Hons.) degree in power systems from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1998 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. (First Hons.) degrees in control systems engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. From 2009 to 2016, he was full professor of Mechatronics and Control Systems at the University of Agder in Norway. Since 2016, he has been a professor of Applied Mechanics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. His current research interests include control systems and mechatronics with applications to automotive control systems and wind energy.

Prof. Karimi is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cyber-Physical Systems, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Machines, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Aerospace System Science and Engineering, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Designs, and Editorial Board Member of various international  journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I: Regular Papers, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems, Information  Sciences, IFAC-Mechatronics, International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, Electronics, Neurocomputing, Asian  Journal of Control, Journal of The Franklin  Institute. He is a member of Agder Academy of Science and Letters and also a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Systems with Uncertainty, the Committee on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, the IFAC Technical Committee on Mechatronic Systems, the Committee on Robust Control, and the Committee on Automotive Control. Prof. Karimi was awarded as the 2016, 2017, and 2018 Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering.

We would like to warmly welcome Professor Dr. Hamid Reza Karimi as Section Editor-in-Chief and look forward to developing the Section "Systems & Control Engineering" under his leadership.