Announcements

The journal Fire (ISSN 2571-6255) is launching a new position—Topical Advisory Panel Member. The main responsibility of the new members of the Topical Advisory Panel is to regularly provide support to Guest Editors, Topic Editors, and Section Board Members. The responsibilities of the Topical Advisory Panel are available here: (https://www.mdpi.com/editors).

Fire is an international peer-reviewed open access journal about the science, policy, and technology of fires and how they interact with communities and the environment, broadly defined, published quarterly online by MDPI. Fire is covered in SCIE, Web of Science. The aims and scope of the journal can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/fire/about.

Each year, the members’ performance is evaluated, and outstanding members will be promoted to the Editorial Board by the Editor-in-Chief.

To qualify as a Topical Advisory Panel Member, applicants must:

• Have expertise and experience in the field related to the journal;
• Have received a Ph.D. in the last 10 years, approximately;
• Have at least 6-8 published papers in the last 5 years as first author or corresponding author;
• Currently hold an independent research position in academia or a government institute.

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

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

This serves to announce to our valued authors based in Japan that value-added tax, or consumption tax will now be imposed on article processing fees and other service fees for all papers submitted, or resubmitted (assigned new paper IDs), effective from 15 August 2021. The change is in accordance with the Japanese "Act for Partial Revision of the Income Tax Act and Other Acts" (Act No. 9 of 2015), which includes a revision of consumption taxation on cross-border supplies of services such as digital content distribution.

For additional information from the National Tax Agency please see here ("Cross-border supplies of electronic services").

Contact: Setsuko Nishihara, MDPI Tokyo

MDPI Books recently released Book Builder, a new online tool to conveniently arrange, design and produce an eBook from any content published in MDPI journals. Book Builder offers two functions: on the one hand (1) Selections, available to every registered user of MDPI; on the other hand (2) Special Issue Reprints, which can be used exclusively by Guest Editors of Special Issues.

Selections

In just a matter of a few clicks, all users are now able to assemble books from MDPI articles and receive instantaneous feedback in the form of a fully produced and compiled book (PDF), which can be downloaded or ordered as print copy. Selections can include any paper published with MDPI, picking and combining content from different journals and special issues.

This way, the user may for example choose to compile an ebook focusing around a particular topic, or assemble articles from a group of others.

We invite you to make yourself familiar with the new tool! The Book Builder can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/books/book_builder.

Special Issue Reprints

The Book Builder allows Guest Editors of MDPI journals to create a reprint from a successfully completed Special Issue or Topical Collection in book format. If you are a Guest Editor for an MDPI journal, you can use the new tool  to create an PDF document which includes all articles published in the Special Issue as well as a book cover and table of contents.

For Special Issues containing a minimum of 5 articles, the Guest Editor can request its publication on the MDPI Book platform. Published reprints are assigned an ISBN and DOI.

In addition to the PDF copy of the Reprint Book, as a token of our gratitude, MDPI offers every Guest Editor one (1) complimentary print copy (via print-on-demand). All contributors benefit from a discount on orders of any additional print copies, to share with colleagues or libraries or others.

Why choose MDPI Books?

In line with our organization's values, MDPI Books publishes all content in open access, promoting the exchange of ideas and knowledge in a globalized world. MDPI Books encompasses all the benefits of open access—high availability and visibility, as well as wide and rapid dissemination. MDPI Books are distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License, meaning as an author you retain the copyright for your work. In addition, with MDPI Books you can complement the digital version of your work with a high-quality printed counterpart.

If you are interested in editing a book volume or series, or have a monograph manuscript to be considered for publication, please submit your proposal online and look at our Information for Authors.

Contact: Laura Wagner, MDPI Books Manager (email)

In June of this year, MDPI will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its foundation. To mark this significant milestone, we have created a 25th Anniversary page on our website that evokes the development of our company over the past quarter-century.

MDPI has been a pioneer of Open Access publishing ever since the concept was first created.

In a wide-ranging interview, our CEO Delia Mihaila reflects on the company’s 25th anniversary and its contribution to the world of scientific publishing.

Delia considers how MDPI has evolved since starting life in 1996 as a visionary ‘project’ run out of an apartment in Basel, Switzerland, by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin. A chemist who was passionate about the long-term preservation of rare chemical sample, Dr. Lin was determined to help scholars publish their findings as quickly as possible and make their research results available to as wide a readership as possible worldwide. That determination remains unchanged 25 years later.

Today, MDPI is an international organization with over 4,000 employees based on three continents and in ten countries, and ranks among the world's top four academic publishers.

MDPI's mission is to accelerate access to new scientific research, delivering insight faster for researchers worldwide. Read more here about the company's remarkable success story and what the Open Access publishing model can offer the global scientific community.

Fire (ISSN 2571-6255) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal concerned with the science, policy, and technology of fires and how they interact with communities and the environment. It is published quarterly online by MDPI. Fire is covered in SCIE, Web of Science. For more information about Fire, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/fire.

Fire is recruiting Editorial Board Members (EBMs) from the following areas:

• wildfires, planned / prescribed fires, and laboratory fires;
• history of fire policy, fire use, and fire impacts;
• behavioral sciences, decision support tools and risk analysis relating to fire;
• fire ignition sources, patterns, and projections;
• applied combustion physics and chemistry;
• fire behavior and modelling;
• smoke and heat transport in buildings.

For more details or to see the current Editorial Board of Fire, please visit the journal website at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/fire.

If you are interested in becoming an Editorial Board Member of Fire, please send your application, including a full academic CV, to fire@mdpi.com.

Fire (ISSN 2571-6255) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal concerned with the science, policy, and technology of fires and how they interact with communities and the environment. It is published quarterly online by MDPI. Fire is covered in SCIE, Web of Science. For more information about Fire, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/fire.

Responsibilities of Fire Topic Editors include the following:

1. Setting up at least one Special Issue (SI) over two years in the journal and proposing a detailed strategy plan for the SI (including soliciting papers, promoting the SI, etc.);
2. Promoting the journal at conferences (adding 1–2 slides into your presentation, distributing flyers, recommending the journal to your colleagues, etc.);
3. Providing support for other Special Issues on topics related to your expertise or when the Guest Editors are not available, including SI promotion via social media, pre-checking new submissions, making decisions, and giving advice on some scientific cases, etc.;
4. Recommending conferences, including physical and virtual, for us to cooperate with if you have conference plans.

Benefits for Fire Topic Editors include the following:

1. Certain discounts for the papers you publish;
2. A recognition certificate as a Topic Editor of Fire;
3. Travel grants for you after one year of tenure has been served.

To apply or request further information, please contact the Fire Editorial Office (fire@mdpi.com).

The journal Fire is launching a new position—Reviewer Board Member. 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 here.

Fire (ISSN 2571-6255) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal concerned with the science, policy, and technology of fires and how they interact with communities and the environment. It is published quarterly online by MDPI. Fire is covered in SCIE, Web of Science. The Aims and Scope of the journal can be found at Aims & Scope.

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

(1) The Fire Editorial Board will acknowledge all Reviewer Board (RB) Members in its annual reviewer list, to be published in the "Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Fire 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 (fire@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

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

We are pleased to inform you that the journal Fire (ISSN 2571-6255) was accepted for inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) in Web of Science in March 2021.

Fire has been publishing research on fire sciences for more than three years, and the journal is expected to receive its first Journal Impact Factor in the June 2022 release of the Journal Citation Reports.

At the same time, Fire continues to be covered in Scopus, AGRIS, AGRICOLA, and many other databases.

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

We look forward to working with you in the future.

Fire Editorial Office
fire@mdpi.com

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.