Announcements

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.

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.

We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our 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 and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".

For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at openaccess@qnl.qa.

MDPI will be attending the AGU 2018 Fall Meeting, to be held in Washington D.C, USA, 10‒14 December 2018.

The AGU 2018 Fall Meeting will mark another dynamic year of discovery in Earth and space science, serve as the advent of AGU’s Centennial year, and provide a special opportunity to share our science with world leaders in Washington, D.C. As the largest Earth and space science gathering in the world, the Fall Meeting places you in the center of a global community of scientists drawn from myriad fields of study whose work protects the health and welfare of people worldwide, spurs innovation, and informs decisions that are critical to the sustainability of the Earth.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Water
• Remote Sensing
• ISPRS International Journal of Geo-information
• Atmosphere
• Geosciences
• Resources
• Climate
• Environments

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth # 737). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may hace. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://fallmeeting.agu.org/2018/

The 2017 CiteScore™ data is available now, based on citation data in the Scopus® database. The current CiteScore reflects citation activity in 2017 for articles published in 2014‒2016. Please note that the list below includes journals assigned a CiteScore in this year’s release. For a full list of journals indexed in Scopus, please see our journal list.

Thirteen of our journals received a CiteScore which is in the top 10% of the distribution in at least one of the categories (marked with * in the table below), while a further 32 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

Unlike CiteScores and the widely used Journal Impact Factors, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metrics are normalized in order to correct for differences in citation practices between scientific fields. Therefore, the SNIP allows direct comparison between journals specialized in different fields.

According to 2017 data, MDPI publishes six journals with an average citation impact, or SNIP, in excess of 1.500. These journals are Biomolecules, Cancers, Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM), Marine Drugs, Remote Sensing and Sensors (see the last column in the table below).

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

MDPI will be represented at the ESA Annual Meeting 2018 which will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, 5–10 August 2018.

Extreme events, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, fires and storms, are exacerbated by human activities and challenge populations, communities and ecosystems, as well as our human health and living conditions. The ability of ecosystems to respond to these challenges depends on the integrity of resilience mechanisms that have been severely undermined by land-use practices that increase effects of extreme conditions. Past civilizations, such as the Maya and Mesopotamians, apparently exacerbated the droughts (that caused their demise) through deforestation and agricultural practices similar to our own. Clearly, the sustainability of ecosystem services and human well-being depends on ecosystem resilience to extreme events.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Forests
• Land
• IJERPH
• Water
• Environments
• Fire
• Sustainability
• Safety
• Agronomy
• Social Science
• Climate

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #208). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have regarding open access publishing or our journals. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://esa.org/neworleans/

We are pleased to announce the results of the first MDPI Writing Prize. We received a large number of entries from across the globe on the theme of “The Global Benefits of Open Research”. It was a pleasure to read so many original, well-researched and well-presented ideas, and the final choice was not an easy one. We are pleased to announce that the winners are as follows:

1st prize (500 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Edmond Sanganyado, Shantou University, China

2nd prizes (250 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Kamala T. Rajahgopal, Asia e University, Malaysia
Yin Zhixuan, Qingdao University of Technology, China

3rd prizes (100 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Alexandra Ticea, Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania
Ankur Sarker, University of Virginia, USA
Daniel Attoye, United Arab Emirates University, UAE

Congratulations to all of them! The winning entries can be downloaded by clicking on the names above. A compilation of all entries will soon be available as an open access book.

The writing prize is sponsored by the MDPI English editing service.

At MDPI, we always want to keep you up to date. Even for already published articles, some corrections or minor changes may occur. To prevent you from missing any updates, from now on you will be able to access the latest version of any manuscript by clicking on the “check for updates” logo that you can find in the PDF file, even if you have saved the file on your computer.

We will be attending the RFG 2018, to be held in Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 16–21 June 2018. It is the first international conference dedicated to the availability of resources needed to sustain future generations. The conference will examine the critical natural resources that have led to the development of the human race over the last 10,000 years, and remain fundamental to our existence—energy, minerals and water. This is a unique opportunity to participate in a conference with implications for a sustainable future. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Resources
Water
Energies
Minerals
Sustainability
Environments

We will be attending the JpGU Meeting 2018. JpGU is an academic union that encompasses all the Earth and Planetary Sciences disciplines and related fields, organizing annual meetings since 2005. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Geosciences
Water
Atmosphere
Minerals
Climate
Environments
Education Sciences
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH)

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #Pub13–14). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.jpgu.org/meeting_e2018/.