Announcements

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 the winner of the best presentation award that Entropy sponsored at the CNS*2019 Workshop on Methods of Information Theory in Computational Neuroscience in Barcelona, Spain, on 16–17 July 2019.

“Adaptability and Efficiency in Neural Coding” by Wiktor Mlynarski and Ann Hermundstad

The ability to dynamically adapt to changes in the environment is one of the defining features of sensory systems. In this work, together with my collaborator Ann Hermundstad of Janelia Research Campus, we developed a normative framework to analyze information processing in adaptive sensory systems. We showed that sensory codes optimized for performing task-relevant computations can be different from codes optimized for adapting to changes in the stimulus distributions that underlie these computations. These differences manifest in the speed of adaptation, the accuracy of the code during periods of adaptation, and the accuracy in the adapted state. Our results provide a unifying perspective on adaptation across a range of sensory systems, environments, and sensory tasks.

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 the winner of the best poster award that Entropy sponsored at the Quantum ThermoDynamics Conference (QTD) in Espoo, Finland, on 23–28 June, 2019.

“Signature of the Transition to a Bound State in Thermoelectric Quantum Transport” by É. Jussiau, M. Hasegawa, and R.S. Whitney

We are studying a quantum dot coupled to two semiconducting reservoirs when the dot level and the electrochemical potential are both close to a band edge in the reservoirs. We have modelled this with an exactly solvable Hamiltonian without interactions (the Fano–Anderson model). The model is known to show an abrupt transition for a broad class of band structures as the dot–reservoir coupling is increased into the strong-coupling regime. This transition involves an infinite-lifetime bound state appearing in the band gap. We determined a signature of this transition in the continuum states of the model, visible as a discontinuous behavior of the dot’s transmission function. This can result in steady-state DC electric and thermoelectric responses having a very strong dependence on coupling close to critical coupling. We show examples where the electrical and thermal conductances and the thermoelectric power factor exhibit huge peaks at critical coupling, while the thermoelectric figure of merit grows as the coupling approaches the critical coupling, with a small dip when reaching it.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the two poster awards that Entropy sponsored at the Quantum Information Revolution: Impact to Foundations (QIRIF) in Växö (Sweden) on 10–13 June, 2019. The Editor-in-Chief of Entropy, Prof. Dr. Kevin H. Knuth (University at Albany, NY, USA), granted the certificate to the winners.

1st prize (350 CHF, certificate)
"Local Observer-Independent Facts is a weaker assumption than Local Causality" by Anibal Utreras-Alarcon

We study the set of correlations that satisfy the assumptions of freedom of choice, locality (defined as parameter independence) and observer-independent facts. The set of these assumptions was previously shown to be in contradiction with the prediction of quantum theory by Caslav Brukner (Brukner, Entropy 20, 350 (2018)). We found that these correlations are not only different from quantum correlations, but also from those that are characterized by a local hidden-variables model. Indeed, the set of local observer-independent facts correlations is a superset of the set of the local hidden-variables model.

2nd prize (150 CHF, certificate)
"Using the Quantum Zeno Effect to Create Phase Contrast in Electron Microscopy" by Pieter Kruit

The concept of interaction-free measurements as proposed by Elitzur and Vaidman [1] for photons, should also work with electrons [2]. When built into a transmission electron microscope [3], this may lead to imaging modes with reduced damage. In our scheme, the electron wave is split by an amplitude splitter in a large component (the reference beam) that passes through a hole in the specimen and a small component (the sample beam) that passes through the sample. After the passage, both beams are cycled back to the amplitude splitter and the process is repeated. If the sample has no effect on the beam, the amplitude in the sample beam slowly builds up until it has the full intensity after m cycles. If the sample does have an influence, either on the amplitude or on the phase, the intensity transfer is disturbed by the quantum Zeno effect, and the intensity stays in the reference beam. Using the model explained in [4], the signals in the reference beam (R) and the sample beam (S) can be calculated as a function of the phase change in the specimen. To get an impression of what kind of images our method would produce, we simulate electron microscopy images of proteins and show “iso-phase lines” or “iso-phase areas” while only causing damage around these lines or in these areas.

[1] Elitzur, A.C.; Vaidman, L. Found. Phys. 1993, 23, 987–997.
[2] Putnam, W.; Yanik, M. Phys. Rev. A 2009, 80, 040902.
[3] Kruit, P.; R.G. Hobbs; C.-S. Kim; Y. Yang; V.R. Manfrinato; J. Hammer; S. Thomas; P. Weber; B. Klopfer; C. Kohstall; T. Juffmann; M.A. Kasevich; P. Hommelhoff; K.K. Berggren. Ultramicroscopy 2016, doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2016.03.004.
[4] Thomas, S.; Kohstall, C.; Kruit, P.; Hommelhoff, P. Phys. Rev. A 2014, 90, 053840.
[5] The authors acknowledge funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

We are pleased to announce the winners of the ISIT2019 EU-based Student Travel Grants, sponsored by Entropy. The awards have been granted to the following two young researchers:

Massimiliano Rossi, PhD student at the University of Verona

Paper Title: Greedy Additive Approximation Algorithms for Minimum-Entropy Coupling Problem
Session: New Developments in Renyi Entropy
Location: Sorbonne, Level 5
Presentation Time: Tuesday, 09 July, 15:10–15:30

Shahar Stein Ioushua, Ph.D. candidate at Tel Aviv University.

Paper Title: Counting Graphs with a Given Degree Sequence: An Information-Theoretic Perspective
Session: Information Theory Methods in Graph Theory
Location: Saint Victor, Level 3
Presentation Time: Wednesday, 10 July, 10:50–11:10

We are pleased to inform that Entropy received an updated Journal Impact Factor of 2.419 in the recent release of the Journal Citation Reports®. The journal's 5-Year Impact Factor is 2.505. Entropy now ranks 28/81 (Q2) in 'Physics, Multidisciplinary'.

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Entropy:

Source: data according to Journal Citation Reports®, 2018 release, a Clarivate Analytics product; and Scopus journal metrics.

We will be attending the GR22 and Amaldi13 event to be held in Valencia, Spain, 7–12 July 2019.

GR22 is the latest in the series of triennial international conferences held under the auspices of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. This conference series constitutes the principal international meetings for scientists working in all areas of relativity and gravitation. The Amaldi conferences are held under the auspices of the Gravitational Wave International Committee. Since 1997, they have been held every two years and are regarded as the most important international conference for the gravitational wave detection community.

In Valencia, GR22 and Amaldi13 are organized as a joint event. The organization is coordinated by Drs. José Antonio Font and José Navarro-Salas from the University of Valencia (UV)/Instituto de Física Corpuscular (UV-CSIC), on behalf of a large national committee. Organizational support is provided by the Fundación Universidad Empresa UV - ADEIT.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Universe
Galaxies
Symmetry
Entropy

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #4). 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://www.gr22amaldi13.com/.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Travel Awards, sponsored by MDPI and Entropy. The awards were granted to three outstanding young researchers working in the thematic areas:

Information Theory

Zahra Baghali Khanian is a PhD student at ICFO Barcelona and UAB Barcelona. She works on quantum Shannon theory and applications in quantum information. She is planning to present her works “Distributed Compression of Correlated Classical-Quantum Sources: The Price of Ignorance” and “Entanglement-Assisted Quantum Data Compression” at the 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT2019, 7–12 July 2019, Paris, France). The award consists of 800 Swiss Francs to be used to attend this conference.

Statistical Theory

Lorenzo Caprini is a PhD student at Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), whose research is focused on the study of active matter systems. He is planning to present his work “Activity-Induced Delocalization and Freezing in Self-Propelled Systems” at the 27th International Conference on Statistical Physics (StatPhys 27, 8–12 July 2019, Buenos Aires, Argentina). The award consists of 800 Swiss Francs to be used to attend this conference.

Thermodynamics

Julian Gonzalez Ayala is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Salamanca, whose research interest involves general properties of thermodynamics systems, optimization and stability of operation regimes, thermal fluctuations, multi-objective optimization, optimization of hybrid power plants, and entropy analysis of complex systems and self-organized critical systems. He is planning to present his work “Thermodynamic Self-Improvement in the Stability of a Low Dissipative Refrigerator Engine” at the 15th Joint European Thermodynamics Conference (JETC2019, 21–24 May 2019, Barcelona, Spain). The award consists of 800 Swiss Francs to be used to attend this conference.

Selecting the three winners was a difficult decision, as we received many high-quality applications from around the world. We thank all applicants. We look forward to receiving more applications for the Entropy 2020 Travel Awards which will be open for applications from September 2019.

For more information about Entropy awards, please check: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/awards