Announcements

The editorial team would like to congratulate the winners of the 2018 Entropy Best Paper Awards. The winner nominations were made by a selection committee, which was chaired by the Editor-in-Chief and supported by twelve Editorial Board Members. The two top-voted papers, in no particular order, have won the 2018 Entropy Best Paper Award (in no particular order):

Critical Behavior in Physics and Probabilistic Formal Languages

Henry W. Lin and Max Tegmark
Entropy 2017, 19(7), 299; doi:10.3390/e19070299.
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/7/299
Download PDF here.

Multiscale Information Decomposition:
Exact Computation for Multivariate Gaussian Processes

Luca Faes, Daniele Marinazzo, and Sebastiano Stramaglia
Entropy 2017, 19(8), 408; doi:10.3390/e19080408
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/8/408
Download PDF here.

We congratulate the authors and we thank them for having chosen Entropy to publish their work.

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our national Open Access agreement with the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Through this national agreement, the Austrian institutions listed below as well as FWF will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by eligible corresponding or funded authors in MDPI journals as long as central funds are available.

All participating institutions have gained access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Funder and Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency. At the same time eligible authors are benefited from an APC discount which comes at no cost for the institutions.

Eligible corresponding 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. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email address. To claim their discount, FWF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript. The institutions will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Eligible authors that have their APC covered by their institution or funder are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "Open Access Funding by the [name of the institution/funder]".

The full text of the agreement is openly available online at: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2536007

For any questions about the agreement, please contact the KEMÖ Consortium at emedien@obvsg.at, FWF at Katharina.Rieck@fwf.ac.at, or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

The Austrian institutions participating in this agreement are:

• Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
• University for Continuing Education Krems
• University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna
• University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien
• Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
• Institute of Science and Technology Austria
• MCI Management Center Innsbruck
• University of Graz
• University of Linz
• University of Salzburg
• Graz University of Technology
• TU Wien
• University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna
• University of Vienna

This is our first collective agreement with a national library consortium, while the individual institutions around the world participating in our IOAP are now more than 500 - see details here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap. We would be mostly interested in discussing about possible collaborations with other consortia, funders, and institutions in our mutual efforts to accelerate Open Access.

We are pleased to announce the new platform Encyclopedia, which is an online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as providing benchmark information for researchers and the general public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge on specific topics.

We encourage authors of review articles to quote and adapt the content of their published papers to create Encyclopedia entries. You can create completely new entries on topics in which you have knowledge and expertise. There is no limit on the topics or research fields. All of science and the humanities are included. Each entry will be published directly after submission.

We also have prepared a DOI application function in Encyclopedia. Once a DOI application is approved, the entry website will announce the DOI number and a pdf version with DOI information will be automatically created.

We look forward to your contributions and hope you will make use of this service. Find more about the service at: https://encyclopedia.pub/

Entropy is currently accepting applications and nominations for three Travel Awards to sponsor postdoctoral fellows or PhD students to attend a relevant conference of their choice in 2019. For more information about the awards and how to apply, click here.

The three thematic areas for the three Travel Awards are:

Information Theory

Statistical Mechanics

Thermodynamics

Applicants can choose only one Travel Award to apply for. Applicants applying to more than one award will be disqualified from all awards.

Please apply the award here by 28 February 2019. The winner will be announced by 31 March 2019.

We are delighted to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now a participant of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). Authors funded by the BMGF can enjoy discounts on the APC, while the funder covers the costs of eligible articles centrally. BMGF also has access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency.

We hope that funded authors find the programme beneficial and we are happy to offer our IOAP to other funders that need a streamlined workflow of compliance checking and APC coverage. 

To claim their discount, BMGF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript.

For any questions about the BMGF agreement, please contact the funder at support@chronos-oa.com or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

The Entropy Steering Committee seeks Expressions of Interest (EoI) from universities/organizations/individual scholars to host an edition of the Entropy Conference Series. There is no restriction in the geographic areas considered.

What is Entropy?

Entropy is a conference series dedicated to bring together scientists and leaders from different areas to discuss important recent developments and ideas of cutting-edge research related to Entropy.

The First Entropy conference was held in 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. This conference brought researchers with an inter-disciplinary nature of contributions from both theoretical and applied perspectives of Entropy, that ranged from Physics to Information theory. You can find a brief summary of the first edition here.

The Selection Committee looks forward to receiving your EoI. Please feel free to forward this call for EoI to other interested parties.

Please note that the follow-on editions will not be restrained to the topics discussed in previous editions and, therefore, new and different topics within the Entropy field are sought.

Important Dates

The Entropy conference is organized every two years. The Entropy Steering Committee is accepting EoIs to organize editions from 2020 onwards.

Facts

Bidders must have the facility to organize and host a three-day symposium of roughly 150–200 participants including:

• Easy access to the symposium venue and the capability to offer a wide range of services, such as catering, WLAN and internet services, organization of social events.
• Ability to cover all costs with registration fees and sponsoring.

When necessary, and based on the input provided by the local host, MDPI will provide administrative support and will manage the website on Sciforum. MDPI will help to edit the abstracts and prepare the conference book. MDPI will help to design the logos and banners for the conference website, flyers, posters, roll-ups, lanyards, conference bags, etc. following the style of previous Entropy edition. MDPI will promote the new conference edition on relevant MDPI journals and any other relevant communication channels.

Expression of Interest Instructions

1. EoI must be submitted to EoI@mdpi.com by 30 November 2018
2. The length of the application should not exceed two A4 pages and should include:
   • Name(s) of the bidder(s), contact details and a short biography
   • Name of the planned venue (city and infrastructure)
   • Proposed dates for the conference
   • Proposed topics for the conference

Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.

We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.

Our editors will be attending the 2018 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW 2018), to be held in Guangzhou, China, on 25–29 November 2018.

ITW 2018 solicits and welcomes original contributions on the frontiers of information theory, coding theory and their applications, as well as the frontiers with other fields of study such as data science, biology and signal processing. The conference structure consists of a daily plenary seminar followed by two parallel paper sessions throughout the day.

The following four MDPI journals will be represented:

Entropy
Information
Challenges
Cryptography

The editorial team of Entropy would like to congratulate the winners of the two Best Early Career Researcher Presentation Awards that Entropy sponsored at the Workshop on Methods of Information Theory in Computational Neuroscience in Seattle (USA) on 17–18 July 2018. Dr. Joseph Lizier (The University of Sydney), the Editorial Board Member of Entropy and Chair of the Workshop, granted the certificate to the winners:

Dr. Siwei Wang (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for her work “Closing the gap from structure to function with information theoretic design principles”;

Dr. Rainer Engelken (Columbia University) for his work “How input spike trains and recurrent dynamics shape the entropy of cortical circuits”.

Congratulations to both of them!