Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Norbert Herencsar has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Section “Engineering” in Fractal and Fractional (ISSN: 2504-3110). His term started in July 2021. 

Name: Dr. Norbert Herencsar
Affiliation: Department of Telecommunications, Brno University of Technology, Technicka 3082/12, 616 00 Brno, Czech Republic
Website: https://www.vutbr.cz/en/people/norbert-herencsar-11823
E-mail: herencsn@ieee.org 

Dr. Norbert Herencsar received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronics & Communication and Teleinformatics from Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic, in 2006 and 2010, respectively. In 2015, he was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Telecommunications, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic. He was a Visiting Researcher at Boğaziçi University, Turkey, Doğuş University, Turkey, and the University of Calgary, Canada. His extensive publication record includes 100+ peer-reviewed journal articles and 120+ international conference proceedings papers. His awards include (among others): Rector Award in the University competition “Top 10 Excellent VUT” for the 9th and 8th most productive scientist at the Brno University of Technology, category “Publications”, in 2011 and 2012, respectively, “The Best Paper Award in Memory of Prof. Dr. Mustafa Bayram” in 2011 at the 7th Int. Conference on Electrical Electronics Engineering (ELECO), Turkey, Certificate of Merit by IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2017, and the ELEX Editorial Contribution Award by IEICE Electronics Express Editorial Committee, Japan, in 2020. He has been collaborating on numerous research projects supported by the MEYS Czech Republic or Czech Science Foundation since 2006. 

His research interests are mainly focused on the following: 

• constant phase element fabrication, modeling, and optimization
• fractional-order circuits, systems, and control
• nano/microelectronics, nanodevices, and energy storage components
• VLSI analog integrated circuits and sensors 

Amongst his numerous appointments and activities, he served as an organizing or a TPC member of the conferences AFRICON, ELECO, I²MTC, ICUMT, IWSSIP, SET-CAS, MWSCAS, ICECS, and TSP, as an invited reviewer for Adv. Mater. Technol., AEU - Int. J. Electron. Commun., Analog Integr. Circuits Signal Process., Chaos Solit. Fractals, Electronics, Energies, Fractal Fract., IEEE Access, IEEE Sens. J., IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I & II, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., Int. J. Electron., J. Adv. Res., J. Circuits Syst. Comput., Microelectron. J., Sens. Actuators A: Phys., Sensors, etc., as an Associate Editor for IEEE Access, IEICE Electronics Express, Journal of Circuits, and Systems and Computers, as an Editorial Board Member of Elektronika ir Elektrotechnika, Fractal and Fractional, and Radioengineering, and a Topics Board Member of Nanomaterials. Dr. Herencsar is an IEEE Senior Member and ranked among the world’s top 2% scientists as reported by Stanford University. 

The editorial team warmly welcomes Dr. Norbert Herencsar as the Editor-in-Chief of the “Engineering” Section, and looks forward to his contribution to the continued success of Fractal and Fractional. For further information on the journal sections, please check here.

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

Fractal and Fractional (ISSN 2504-3110) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of fractals and fractional calculus and their applications in different fields of science and engineering published quarterly online by MDPI. The journal is included in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Scopus, and our 2020 Impact Factor is 3.313.

The Fractal and Fractional editorial team is pleased to announce this open call for Special Issue proposals, which offers a group of authors the opportunity to work on an interconnected set of papers on an innovative topic. We are soliciting high-quality proposals that will be evaluated in a continuous selection process throughout the year.

Proposals for a Special Issue should have a well-articulated unifying topic and reflect on an international level, the best works in a particular research area (either an established or an important emerging area), in which future investigations may be propelled by the publication of a set of novel research papers. Hence, an international group of Guest Editors and a few high-quality planned papers are always encouraged when it comes to proposals.

Proposals for Special Issues must be sent to the Editorial Office (fractalfract@mdpi.com), which will then forward them to the Editor-in-Chief of Fractal and Fractional for evaluation.

Information to be provided in a proposal:

• A 300–500-word summary that clearly states the significance, novelty, technical advancement, and adherence to the scope of the journal of the proposed topic;
• A few keywords on the topic;
• A plan for obtaining high-quality papers or a list of at least three planned papers;
• A brief resume of the proposed Guest Editors, together with their information (title, name, email, affiliation, personal website, keywords of interests);
• A proposed submission deadline (a Special Issue will usually be open for submissions for 6–8 months);
• 10 confirmed contributors.

Guest Editor(s) Role:

Once the proposal is accepted, the Guest Editor will circulate the Call for Papers for the Special Issue and invite submissions.

The Guest Editor has the privilege of publishing one paper free of charge (with the CHF 1600 publication fee waived) in this Special Issue and of inviting some feature papers to be published with a special discount.

Each submission will undergo a formal peer-review process after which, the assigned editor will ask the Guest Editor, the Editor-in-Chief, or a suitable Editorial Board Member to decide whether the paper is acceptable for publication in Fractal and Fractional.

If ten or more papers are published in this Special Issue, a Special Issue book can be organized, and a hard copy will be sent to each Guest Editor.

Editorial Office’s Role:

The Editorial Office will set up the Special Issue website, arrange promotional material, assist with invitations to contribute papers, and take care of administrative tasks associated with peer review, including inviting reviewers, collating reports, contacting authors, and arranging professional production before publication.

Please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office if you are interested and would like further details and clarification.

We look forward to receiving your creative proposals.

Fractal and Fractional Editorial Office

To expand our contribution to the Fractal and Fractional journal, we are recruiting scientists to join our Editorial Board.

We encourage applications from researchers with a background in a wide range of subject areas (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/fractalfract/sections). Should you decide to serve on the Editorial Board, you would be responsible for some of the following tasks depending on your availability:

• Reviewing a couple of manuscripts per year;
• Editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research and making final decisions for submitted papers;
• Recommending timely topics and suggesting potential Guest Editors;
• Publishing one paper per year, free of charge, in open access format;
• Identifying appropriate conferences for Editors to attend;
• Promoting the journal.

Fractal and Fractional (ISSN 2504-3110) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of fractals and fractional calculus and their applications in different fields of science and engineering published quarterly online by MDPI. The journal is included in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Scopus, and our 2020 Impact Factor is 3.313.

The term of the Editorial Board membership is two years, after that period, it can be renewed.

The 2020 citation metrics have been officially released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)!

We are pleased to announce that 85 MDPI journals are included, of which:

• 10 journals received their first impact factor
• 96% of journals increased their impact factor from 2019
• 32 journals (38%) ranked among the top 25% of journals, in at least one category

* Journals given their first Impact Factor in 2021

Source: 2020 Journal Impact Factors, Journal Citation Reports ® (Clarivate, 2021)

We are pleased to announce that 14 new scholars have been appointed Editorial Board Members for the journal Fractal and Fractional: 

Dr. Devendra Kumar (University of Rajasthan, India);
Dr. Haibo Chen (Central South University, China);
Dr. Saptarshi Das (University of Exeter, UK);
Prof. Dr. Józef Banaś (Rzeszów University of Technology, Poland);
Prof. Dr. Sergei Fedotov (University of Manchester, UK);
Prof. Dr. Omar Abu Arqub (Al Balqa Applied University, Jordan);
Prof. Dr. Didier Delignières (University Montpellier, France);
Prof. Dr. Stanislaw Migorski (Jagiellonian University, Poland);
Prof. Dr. Costas Psychalinos (University of Patras, Greece);
Prof. Dr. Mahamadi Warma (George Mason University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Masahiro Yamamoto (University of Tokyo, Japan);
Prof. Dr. Tassos C. Bountis (University of Patras, Greece);
Prof. Dr. Riccardo Caponetto (University of Catania, Italy);
Prof. Dr. Alex Iosevich (University of Rochester, USA).

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.

We are pleased to announce that 10 new scholars have been appointed as Editorial Board Members for the journal Fractal and Fractional:

Dr. Paul Eloe (University of Dayton, USA);
Prof. Dr. Eduardo Hernandez (Universidade de Sao Paulo-USP, Brazil);
Prof. Dr. Changpin Li (Shanghai University, China);
Prof. Dr. Nicos Makris (Southern Methodist University, USA);
Prof. Dr. Costas Psychalinos (University of Patras, Greece);
Prof. Dr. Agnieszka B. Malinowska (Bialystok University of Technology, Poland);
Prof. Dr. Jie Xiao (Memorial University, Canada);
Prof. Dr. Eli Barkai (Bar Ilan's Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Israel);
Prof. Dr. Weihua Deng (Lanzhou University, China);
Prof. Dr. Rudolf Hilfer (University of Stuttgart, Germany).

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)