The purpose of the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is to help raise awareness of the possibilities that the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) can bring to societies and economies, as well as of ways to bridge the digital divide. 17 May marks the anniversary of the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention and the creation of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

This year, World Telecommunication and Information Society Day focuses on “Empowering the least developed countries (LDCs) through information and communication technologies.” As the world becomes increasingly adept at leveraging the Internet for value creation, LDCs risk falling further behind. To further explore the information about digital transformation in these LDCs and communication technologies in the rest of the world on the 2023 World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, we have gathered academic research from several journals on the topic of digital communication, all of which are open access, enabling practitioners, policymakers and people around the world to access and share up-to-date scientific knowledge.

Let us celebrate the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day together.

“Research on Progress of Blockchain Consensus Algorithm: A Review on Recent Progress of Blockchain Consensus Algorithms”
by Huanliang Xiong, Muxi Chen, Canghai Wu, Yingding Zhao and Wenlong Yi
Future Internet 2022, 14(2), 47; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14020047
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/2/47

“Medical Internet-of-Things-Based Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Hyperparameter-Optimized Neural Networks”
by Roseline Oluwaseun Ogundokun, Sanjay Misra, Mychal Douglas Robertas Damaševičius and Rytis Maskeliūnas
Future Internet 2022, 14(5), 153; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14050153
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/5/153

“Digital Twin—Cyber Replica of Physical Things: Architecture, Applications, and Future Research Directions”
by Cheng Qian, Xing Liu, Colin Ripley, Mian Qian, Fan Liang and Wei Yu
Future Internet 2022, 14(2), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14020064
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/2/64

“From 5G to 6G—Challenges, Technologies, and Applications”
by Ahmed I. Salameh and Mohamed El Tarhuni
Future Internet 2022, 14(4), 117; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14040117
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/4/117

“Self-Organizing Networks for 5G and Beyond: A View from the Top”
by Andreas G. Papidas and George C. Polyzos
Future Internet 2022, 14(3), 95; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14030095
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/3/95

“Network Function Virtualization and Service Function Chaining Frameworks: A Comprehensive Review of Requirements, Objectives, Implementations, and Open Research Challenges”
by Haruna Umar Adoga and Dimitrios P. Pezaros
Future Internet 2022, 14(2), 59; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14020059
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/2/59

“Solar Radiation Forecasting by Pearson Correlation Using LSTM Neural Network and ANFIS Method: Application in the West-Central Jordan”
by Hossam Fraihat, Amneh A. Almbaideen, Abdullah Al-Odienat, Bassam Al-Naami, Roberto De Fazio and Paolo Visconti
Future Internet 2022, 14(3), 79; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14030079
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/3/79

“ML-Based 5G Network Slicing Security: A Comprehensive Survey”
by Ramraj Dangi, Akshay Jadhav, Gaurav Choudhary, Nicola Dragoni, Manas Kumar Mishra and Praveen Lalwani
Future Internet 2022, 14(4), 116; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14040116
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/4/116

“Virtual Power Plant Optimization in Smart Grids: A Narrative Review”
by Bianca Goia, Tudor Cioara and Ionut Anghel
Future Internet 2022, 14(5), 128; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14050128
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/5/128

“Federated Learning and Its Role in the Privacy Preservation of IoT Devices”
by Tanweer Alam and Ruchi Gupta
Future Internet 2022, 14(9), 246; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14090246
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/9/246

We are delighted to announce the winners of the Future Internet 2023 Best Paper Award—Mr. Haokun Fang and Prof. Dr. Quan Qian, from Shanghai University, China. All papers published from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2021 in Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) were considered for the award. After a thorough evaluation of the originality and significance of the papers, citations, and downloads, the winners were selected by the journal Award Committee led by the Section Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista.

“Privacy Preserving Machine Learning with Homomorphic Encryption and Federated Learning”
by Haokun Fang and Quan Qian
Future Internet 2021, 13(94), 2576; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13040094
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/4/94

The winners will receive CHF 500, a certificate, and a chance to publish a paper free of charge after peer review in Future Internet in 2023.

As a leading open access publisher, MDPI provides scholars with a high-quality and rich academic exchange platform by continuously expanding into new and exciting research areas.

In December 2022, MDPI launched five new journals, covering multiple subjects such as life sciences, biology, medicine and pharmacology, social sciences and humanities. These new journals are being edited by established scholars across the world.

If you are interested in creating more open access journals with us to publish cutting-edge research, please send your journal proposal application to [email protected].

MDPI is pleased to announce that we now display the co-authors’ email addresses in addition to the corresponding author’s email address on the webpage of published papers, protected by Captcha. For more information about this change, please visit the journal’s instructions for authors page. 

We believe this change will facilitate academic discussions and advance our cause of open science and research. The corresponding authors are responsible for communicating with their co-authors and indicating in our system (https://susy.mdpi.com/) if co-authors would prefer for their email addresses not to be displayed.

On 9 February 2023, Clarivate, a global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics, added the Preprint Citation Index to the Web of Science platform, streamlining the research process by allowing researchers to locate and link to preprints alongside other trusted content in the database.

The Preprint Citation Index will act as a bridge to connect cutting-edge preprints with peer-reviewed journal articles published within the Web of Science Core Collection. Alerts can be easily set to monitor new research across several repositories and authors will also be able to include preprints on their Web of Science Research Profile to more accurately display their various research outputs.

As of its launch, the Preprint Citation Index will provide nearly two million preprints from various repositories, including MDPI’s own Preprints.org.

MDPI's Preprints Platform – Preprints.org

To advance Open Science and the fast dissemination of research, MDPI offers researchers a free multidisciplinary preprint platform. Preprints.org accepts submissions from all research areas and offers authors high visibility, permanent archiving, article-level Metrics and immediately citable content by assigning a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to all preprints.

During submission to any MDPI journal, authors have the option to share their research as a preprint. After an initial screening, the manuscript is available online in 48 hours or less. Once online, preprints can be downloaded, shared, commented on, and cited, providing authors maximum visibility.

We invite you to join the ranks of the over 100k researchers using Preprints.org and share your research.

For more information, please visit Preprints.org.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative—the MDPI Special Issue Mentor Program.

This program will enable early career researchers (who must hold a Ph.D. in a related field) to experience editing a Special Issue in MDPI journals, under the mentorship of our experienced Editorial Board Members or other experienced scientists. The mentor program will provide an excellent opportunity for early career scientists to gain editorial experience, and to cultivate their ability to edit scientific research.

The mentee’s responsibilities include:

• Proposing a Special Issue title and assisting the mentor in preparing a summary (around 200–400 words) and 3–10 keywords describing the background, importance, and goal of the Issue;
• Writing a brief promotion plan for the Special Issue;
• Preparing a list of scholars who may be interested in the Issue and personally e-mailing invitations on behalf of Guest Editors;
• Writing an editorial for the online Special Issue together with the mentor.

The mentor’s responsibilities include:

• Conducting a final check before the Special Issue is published online;
• Performing editorial control of the Special Issue and quality control of the publications, both of which must be carried out in a timely manner;
• Providing suggestions to younger scholars if they have any doubts or concerns regarding submissions;
• Organizing video calls with young scholars and the Editorial Office regularly to discuss problems and improvement suggestions for the Special Issue;
• Making and submitting decisions regarding submissions with the assistance of mentees.

Certificates and awards:
After the Special Issue closes, the Editorial Office will provide official certificates for all the mentors and early career researchers.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your Special Issue proposal to the Editorial Office of a journal you choose, and we will discuss the process (i.e., mentor collaboration, Special Issue topic feasibility analysis, etc.) in further detail. The full list of MDPI journals is as follows: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals.

In addition to the new Special Issue Mentor Program, we will continue to welcome all Special Issue proposals focusing on hot research topics.

We are very pleased to announce that Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) will receive an Impact Factor from the Web of Science in June 2023. Thank you for your continued support for Future Internet. More information can be accessed at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/4252.

We would like to extend our gratitude to the authors, editors, and reviewers whose efforts have helped us to achieve this milestone!

For more journal statistics, please visit the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/stats.

MDPI has just become the first open access (OA) publisher to reach the milestone of one million articles published. That is one million articles freely available to all, to circulate and build upon! We are proud to share this special moment with the global scientific community.

This landmark has been reached thanks to the immeasurable support of more than 600,000 expert reviewers, 66,000 editorial board members and 6700 hard-working colleagues across MDPI’s global offices.

Within more than 25 years of publishing, our journals received 2.1 million manuscripts and generated 4.6 million peer review reports to get to one million papers published.

Reaching the milestone of one million articles published reinforces our mission to remove any existing barriers and to make scientific research accessible to all. Since its inception, MDPI’s goal has been to create reliable processes to make science open. This is a path towards facilitating the dissemination of novel insights in scientific communities.

Regular feedback from authors and reviewers shows that our service is greatly appreciated and needed. At the same time, the feedback helps us identify areas for further improvement.

As it stands, a significant share of published research findings remain closed access. More than half of the content published with the most well-known legacy publishers stays behind a paywall, and that is not including articles published in hybrid OA journals, or made available months or years after publication.

A new policy announced by the US administration in August 2022 requires that, as of January 2026, all US federally funded research be made freely and immediately available after publication. While the new policy does not mandate articles be published under an open access license, it is aligned with the open access movement in removing all barriers to research. Similarly, some of the most advanced research institutions in the world intend to have all funded research articles published in open access by 2025.

MDPI is proud to be the leading agent of the transition to open access.

"Thanks a Million" to all the contributors!

We are currently recruiting Editorial Board Members (EBMs) for MDPI journals indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in Web of Science. In particular, we are looking for experts who are interested in aiding in the development of our journals and safeguarding the scientific quality of the published findings.

Journals currently listed in the ESCI will receive an Impact Factor in June 2023, according to the changes announced by Web of Science (Clarivate). Therefore, this is an excellent time to become an Editorial Board Member for one of these fast-developing journals.

If you are interested in sharing your expertise in one of the journals listed below, please send us an application using this link.

The Editorial Office of the journal will contact you once the application has been approved.
Editorial Board Members are responsible for academic decisions on manuscripts in their field of expertise, will edit Special Issues, and may be invited to review manuscripts. The initial term lasts for two years, after which it can be renewed, and entails the following:

• Prescreening and making decisions on new submissions related to your research interests;
• Setting up at least one Special Issue during your term on a topic related to your research interests (or supervising Special Issues related to your research field);
• Providing input or feedback regarding journal policies;
• Helping to promote the journal among your peers or at conferences;
• Attending Board meetings to suggest journal development strategies;
• Reviewing manuscripts.

Editorial Board Members are entitled to a full waiver on one publication per year in the journal that they serve and need to be experts in their fields.

The list of ESCI journals can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals/esci.

Please find the list of ESCI journals, categorized by subject, for which we are recruiting Editorial Board Members below.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative—the Special Issue Mentor Program.

This program aims to provide an opportunity for early career scientists to enhance their editing, networking, and organizational skills as well as to work closely with our journal to gain more editorial experience. Early career scientists who have novel ideas for new Future Internet Special Issues will act as Guest Editors under the mentorship of an experienced scientist; this mentor could be a member of the Editorial Board of Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903), from other well-established research institutes or laboratories, etc.

The mentee’s responsibilities include:

• Providing a CV, including a list of publications;
• Proposing a Special Issue title and a short introduction;
• Writing a brief promotion plan for the Special Issue;
• Writing an editorial for the online Special Issue;
• Reviewing and making decisions on submissions under the mentorship of our Editorial Board Members.

The mentor’s responsibilities include:

• Conducting a final check before the Special Issue is published online;
• Co-editing the Special Issue with younger scholars and performing quality control of the publications in the Special Issue;
• Providing suggestions to younger scholars if they have doubts or concerns regarding submissions;
• Organizing video calls with young scholars and the Editorial Office regularly to discuss problems and improvement suggestions for the Special Issue.

Certificates and awards:
After the Special Issue closes, the Editorial Office will provide official certificates for all the mentors and mentees. If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your Special Issue proposal to the Future Internet Editorial Office ([email protected]), and we will discuss the process (mentor collaboration, Special Issue topic feasibility analysis, etc.) in further detail.

In addition to the new Special Issue Mentor Program, Future Internet continues to welcome all Special Issue proposals based on hot research topics as usual.

Future Internet Editorial Office

We are pleased to announce that the website of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation has been revamped! For the past couple of months, our UX UI team and front-end developers have been working hard to launch the website in time for the opening of the Sustainability Awards nominations.

The website is not the only thing that has had a remodeling. Indeed, the format of the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award (ESLA) has been updated. ESLA is now a competition open to individual researchers or start-ups founded by researchers under the age of 35. Nominee applications will go through 2 rounds of selection until the final 3 are decided. The finalists will then be invited to give pitch presentations during the Award Ceremony to win either first place (10,000 USD) or runner-up (2 x 5000 USD).

The World Sustainability Award, on the other hand, remains the same: a total prize money of 100,000 USD is up for grabs by senior individual researchers or groups of researchers from the international research community.

Nominations for both the World Sustainability Award and the Emerging Sustainability Leader award are now open! Check out our new website for more information on how to nominate.

Peer Review Week began 19 September 2022 under the theme of “Research Integrity: Creating and Supporting Trust in Research”. Through various blog articles, podcast, and webinar, we discussed this crucial subject throughout the week, celebrating the essential role peer review plays in maintaining research quality.

To begin, we held a Webinar on the topic. Professor Peter W. Choate and Dr. Emmanuel Obeng-Gyasi joined Dr. Ioana Craciun, one of MDPI’s scientific officers, for an in-depth discussion.

We invite you to view the event recording:

During the week, the MDPI Blog in a series articles highlighted how good Peer Review safeguards research integrity. The following topics were covered:

• Peer Review Week 2022
• Research Integrity
• What We’ve Learned About Peer Review Reports
• 4 Steps to the Perfect Peer Review Report
• How to Write the Perfect Peer Review Report: An Interview
• Inviting Great Peer Reviewers

In a new edition of Insight Faster, an MDPI podcast, we were delighted to talk to the co-chairs of the Peer Review Week committee, Jayashree Rajagopalan (Senior Manager of Global Community Engagement for CACTUS) and Danielle Padula (Head of Marketing and Community Development at Scholastica) to get their take on this year’s event and its related topics.

You can find the Podcast here.

We hope you enjoy the contents!

Dr. William Liu is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE), School of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences (SECMS) at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand. He holds Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering, both obtained at the University of Canterbury (UC), New Zealand, in 2005 and 2010, respectively. He worked as a network planner and designer in Beijing Telecom in China for 5 years before moving to New Zealand in 2002. He has co-authored more than 100 papers published in international journals and conferences, and he participates in the Program Committees of several premier IEEE conferences, including INFOCOM, GLOBECOM, ICC, GreenCom, CloudNet, DRCN, RNDM and ATNAC. He is the Founding and current Chair of IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) New Zealand North Chapter. He is the current Chair of IEEE New Zealand North Section Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology (SIGHT). He has been a Senior member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Green Communications and Computing (TCGCC) since 2011 and a Senior member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Big Data (TCBD) since 2015. He is a member of the New Zealand Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Tertiary Education Centre (STEM-TEC).

The following is a short Q&A with Dr. William Liu:

1. We have always been committed to publishing high-quality articles that are included in SCIE. As an Editorial Board Member of the journal Future Internet, what do you consider the criteria for manuscript screening to be? What aspects of articles do you like most?

The criteria include that the topic/ idea is novel, solid experiments and analysis, and the verification of formulas. Of course, in cases where there is a novel idea and perfect experimental analysis, we cannot have both, so the idea is novel and the requirements for the experiment can be appropriately reduced. I do not care about author groups. The editorial department needs to control the authorship in the manuscript. It is important to avoid including scholars from well-known institutions or well-known scholars who did not contribute to the article in the authorship.

2. The Editorial Office has recently made plans to increase our journal citations and we would like to take the journal to the next level by publishing more high-quality papers. Would you recommend your colleagues to contribute to Future Internet? Would you like to participate in some journal construction work for Future Internet (e.g., decision-making, webinars, reviewing)?

I like the name of the journal Future Internet very much, and it is also very attractive that Future Internet ranks 92 out of 352 (Q2) in “Computer Networks and Communications”. I am very willing to recommend my colleagues to contribute to Future Internet, and participate in the construction of the journal, such as participating in conferences, reviewing manuscripts, promoting Future Internet on the webinars I take part in, sending calls for papers on the mailing lists and participating in the webinars held by our journal to discuss the hot topics of Climate Extremes, Climate Crisis, ICT, smart grid, energy network, coordinated communication and networking.

Peer review constitutes an essential part of the publication process, ensuring that Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) maintains its high standards for the quality of its published papers. We are looking to recruit expert reviewers to help uphold the quality and efficiency of Future Internet. More information about the role is available at: https://www.mdpi.com/reviewers.

To qualify as a reviewer, applicants must have published around eight papers related to remote sensing in the last 5 years and hold a Ph.D. degree.

We will extend the following benefits to reviewers:

• Receiving a discount voucher code based on the review quality;
• Inclusion in the journal’s annual acknowledgment of reviewers; more details can be found at https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/14/2/53;
• Consideration for the journal’s Outstanding Reviewer Award; details can be found at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/awards;
• Invitation to join the Reviewer Board; see https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/submission_reviewers for more information.

To apply, please visit the following link: https://susy.mdpi.com/volunteer/journals/review.

MDPI will be attending the Conference on Complex Systems (CCS2022) in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, which will take place from 17 to 21 October 2022. The CCS is the largest and most important annual meeting of the international complex systems community. It comes under the auspices of the Complex Systems Society. This edition, organized by IFISC, takes place after previous events held in Lyon, Singapore, Thessaloniki, and Cancun.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Entropy;
• Fractal and Fractional;
• Symmetry;
• Mathematics;
• Dynamics;
• Algorithms;
• Systems;
• Informatics;
• MAKE;
• Information;
• Future Internet;
• Applied System Innovation;
• Data.

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit the following link: https://www.ccs2022.org/.

“Phishing Attacks Survey: Types, Vectors, and Technical Approaches”
by Rana Alabdan
Future Internet 2020, 12(10), 168; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12100168
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/10/168

“An Updated Survey of Efficient Hardware Architectures for Accelerating Deep Convolutional Neural Networks”
by Maurizio Capra et al.
Future Internet 2020, 12(7), 113; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12070113
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/7/113

“Long-Range Wireless Radio Technologies: A Survey”
by Brandon Foubert et al.
Future Internet 2020, 12(1), 13; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12010013
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/1/13

“Software Defined Networking Flow Table Management of OpenFlow Switches Performance and Security Challenges: A Survey”
by Babangida Isyaku et al.
Future Internet 2020, 12(9), 147; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12090147
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/9/147

“Know Your Customer (KYC) Implementation with Smart Contracts on a Privacy-Oriented Decentralized Architecture”
by Nikolaos Kapsoulis et al.
Future Internet 2020, 12(2), 41; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12020041
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/2/41

“An Organized Repository of Ethereum Smart Contracts’ Source Codes and Metrics”
by Giuseppe Antonio Pierro et al.
Future Internet 2020, 12(11), 197; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12110197
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/11/197

“Modeling and Simulation Tools for Fog Computing—A Comprehensive Survey from a Cost Perspective”
by Spiridoula V. Margariti et al.
Future Internet 2020, 12(5), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12050089
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/5/89

“Role of Artificial Intelligence in Shaping Consumer Demand in E-Commerce”
by Laith T. Khrais
Future Internet 2020, 12(12), 226; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12120226
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/12/226

“Improving Transaction Speed and Scalability of Blockchain Systems via Parallel Proof of Work”
by Shihab Shahriar Hazari et al.
Future Internet 2020, 12(8), 125; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12080125
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/8/125

“Well-Being and Social Media: A Systematic Review of Bergen Addiction Scales”
by Mirko Duradoni et al.
Future Internet 2020, 12(2), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12020024
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/2/24

“ThermalAttackNet: Are CNNs Making It Easy to Perform Temperature Side-Channel Attack in Mobile Edge Devices?”
by Somdip Dey et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(6), 146; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13060146
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/6/146

“Experiment Information System Based on an Online Virtual Laboratory”
by Chuanyan Hao et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(2), 27; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13020027
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/2/27

“Privacy Preserving Machine Learning with Homomorphic Encryption and Federated Learning”
by Haokun Fang et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(4), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13040094
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/4/94

“A Systematic Review of Cybersecurity Risks in Higher Education”
by Joachim Bjørge Ulven et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(2), 39; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13020039
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/2/39

“Designing a Network Intrusion Detection System Based on Machine Learning for Software Defined Networks”
by Abdulsalam O. Alzahrani et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(5), 111; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13050111
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/5/111

“Evaluation of Digital Piracy by Youths”
by Łukasz Tomczyk
Future Internet 2021, 13(1), 11; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13010011
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/1/11

“Using Machine Learning for Web Page Classification in Search Engine Optimization”
by Goran Matošević et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13010009
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/1/9

“Use of Social Media Data in Disaster Management: A Survey”
by Jedsada Phengsuwan et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(2), 46; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13020046
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/2/46

“IoT Technologies during and Beyond COVID-19: A Comprehensive Review”
by Mohamed Yousif et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(5), 105; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13050105
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/5/105

“Survey on Intelligence Edge Computing in 6G: Characteristics, Challenges, Potential Use Cases, and Market Drivers”
by Ahmed Al-Ansi et al.
Future Internet 2021, 13(5), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13050118
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/5/118

We are pleased to announce the launch of a project, entitled Editor's Choice Articles, in Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903). A list of the high-quality and interesting papers that were specifically recommended by our Editorial Board Members can be found at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/editors_choice. We have selected 10 of these papers to display here. The paper list is as follows: 

“IoT for Smart Cities: Machine Learning Approaches in Smart Healthcare—A Review”
by Taher M. Ghazal, Mohammad Kamrul Hasan, Muhammad Turki Alshurideh, Haitham M. Alzoubi, Munir Ahmad, Syed Shehryar Akbar, Barween Al Kurdi and Iman A. Akour
Future Internet 2021, 13(8), 218; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13080218
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/8/218 

”Designing a Network Intrusion Detection System Based on Machine Learning for Software Defined Networks”
by Abdulsalam O. Alzahrani and Mohammed J. F. Alenazi
Future Internet 2021, 13(5), 111; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13050111
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/5/111 

“A Systematic Review of Cybersecurity Risks in Higher Education”
by Joachim Bjørge Ulven and Gaute Wangen
Future Internet 2021, 13(2), 39; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13020039
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/2/39 

“Characterization of the Teaching Profile within the Framework of Education 4.0”
by María Soledad Ramírez-Montoya, María Isabel Loaiza-Aguirre, Alexandra Zúñiga-Ojeda and May Portuguez-Castro
Future Internet 2021, 13(4), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13040091
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/4/91

“Survey of Localization for Internet of Things Nodes: Approaches, Challenges and Open Issues”
by Sheetal Ghorpade, Marco Zennaro and Bharat Chaudhari
Future Internet 2021, 13(8), 210; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13080210
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/8/210 

“Distributed Ledger Technology Review and Decentralized Applications Development Guidelines”
by Claudia Antal, Tudor Cioara, Ionut Anghel, Marcel Antal and Ioan Salomie
Future Internet 2021, 13(3), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13030062
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/3/62

“Research on the Impacts of Generalized Preceding Vehicle Information on Traffic Flow in V2X Environment”
by Xiaoyuan Wang, Junyan Han, Chenglin Bai, Huili Shi, Jinglei Zhang and Gang Wang
Future Internet 2021, 13(4), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13040088
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/4/88 

“Privacy Preserving Machine Learning with Homomorphic Encryption and Federated Learning”
by Haokun Fang and Quan Qian
Future Internet 2021, 13(4), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13040094
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/4/94

“Using Machine Learning for Web Page Classification in Search Engine Optimization”
by Goran Matošević, Jasminka Dobša and Dunja Mladenić
Future Internet 2021, 13(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13010009
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/1/9

MDPI will be attending the 5th China Intelligent Optimization and Scheduling Conference from 12 to 14 August 2022, in Taiyuan, China.

Themed “Intelligent Optimisation for Scheduling”, the conference will focus on big data, artificial intelligence, simulation optimization, intelligent optimization, scheduling optimization, and other directions through conference presentations, group presentations, wall presentations, enterprise application demonstrations, etc., to carry out cutting-edge theories, methods, technologies, and applications, and will invite famous publishers at home and abroad to introduce journal submissions. The conference will select outstanding academic papers, young scientists, outstanding Ph.D. theses, outstanding M.Sc. theses, innovative application practice projects, etc.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Sensors;
• Systems;
• Mathematics;
• Axioms;
• Smart Cities;
• Future Internet;
• Data;
• Algorithms;
• Automation;
• Signals.

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to start a conversation with us. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions that you may have.

We are proud to recognize the winners of MDPI’s 2021 Travel Awards in the subject area of “Computer Science & Mathematics” for their outstanding presentations and to present them with the prize.

MDPI journals regularly offer travel awards to encourage talented junior scientists to present their latest research at academic conferences in specific fields, which helps to increase their influence.

The winners mentioned below were carefully selected by the journal editors based on an outline of their research and the work to be presented at an academic conference.

We would like to warmly congratulate the winners of Travel Awards for the year 2021 and wish them the greatest success with their future research endeavors.

MDPI will continue to enhance communication among scientists.

Computers:

• Umberto Michieli, University of Padova, Italy

Journal of Imaging:

• Cameron Kaye, University of Manitoba, Canada
• Alexandra Trujillo, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina

Symmetry:

• José María, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain
• Naser Ojaroudi Parchin, University of Bradford, UK

In order to acknowledge our reviewers, who so generously dedicate their time to reviewing papers and demonstrate diligence, professionalism, and timeliness when reviewing manuscripts, MDPI journals regularly offer outstanding reviewer awards to scholars who participate in the peer-review process.

We are proud to recognize the winners for the year 2021 in the “Computer Science and Mathematics” for their outstanding contributions among extensive competition by presenting them with an Outstanding Reviewer Award.

We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of the winners on their achievement.

MDPI will continue to provide support and recognition to the academic community.

Algorithms:

• Maxim A. Dulebenets, SA Florida A&M University-Florida State University, USA
• Artur Jez, University of Wrocław, Poland
• Dmitry Lukyanenko, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

Forecasting:

• Juan Ramón Trapero Arenas, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

Future Internet:

• Pedro Pablo Garrido Abenza, Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche, Spain
• Roberto Saia, University of Cagliari, Italy
• Marek Bolanowski, Rzeszow University of Technology, Poland

Journal of Imaging:

• Jung Sun Yoo, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China
• Josemaria Martinezo, University of the Basque Country, Spain

Mathematics:

• Maria Alessandra Ragusa, Università di Catania, Italy; DN University, Russia
• Endre Kovács, University of Miskolc, Hungary
• Roman Vavrek, VŠB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
• Giacomo Ascione, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy
• Giorgio Sonnino, University in the City of Brussels, Belgium

Signals:

• Nina Golyandina, St. Petersburg State University, Russia
• Cataldo Guaragnella, Politecnico di Bari, Italy

Symmetry:

• Stefan Groote, University of Tartu, Estonia
• José Antonio Oller, Universidad de Murcia, Spain
• Kazuharu Bamba, Fukushima University, Japan

MDPI’s Young Investigator Awards recognize promising junior researchers, acknowledge their contributions, and enhance communication among scientists. We are proud to present the winners for the year 2021 in the “Computer Science & Mathematics”, who were selected by the journals’ editors.

We warmly congratulate the awarded Young Investigators for their outstanding contributions.

MDPI will continue to provide support and recognition to the academic community.

Mathematics:

• Marina Murillo Arcila, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

Symmetry:

• Tanmoy Paul, University of Burdwan, India

The purpose of our best paper awards is to promote and recognize the most impactful contributions published within MDPI journals.

The editors of each journal carefully selected reviews and research papers through a rigorous judging process based on the criteria such as scientific merit, overall impact, and quality of the presentation of the papers published in the journal.

We are honored to present the winners in the “Computer Science & Mathematics”, who were selected amongst extensive competition, and congratulate the authors for their outstanding scientific publications.

MDPI will continue to provide support and recognition to the academic community.

Axioms:

• A New gH-Difference for Multi-Dimensional Convex Sets and Convex Fuzzy Sets
  By Luciano Stefanini and Barnabas Bede
  Axioms 2019, 8(2), 48; doi:10.3390/axioms8020048

• Initial Value Problem for Nonlinear Fractional Differential Equations with ψ-Caputo Derivative via Monotone Iterative Technique
  By Choukri Derbazi, Zidane Baitiche, Mouffak Benchohra and Alberto Cabada
  Axioms 2020, 9(2), 57; doi:10.3390/axioms9020057

Future Internet:

• A review of Machine Learning and IoT in Smart Transportation
  By Fotios Zantalis, Grigorios Koulouras, Sotiris Karabetsos and Dionisis Kandris
  Future Internet 2019, 11(4), 94; doi:10.3390/fi11040094

Signals:

• Recognition of Blinks Activity Patterns during Stress Conditions Using CNN and Markovian Analysis
  By Alexandra I. Korda, Giorgos Giannakakis, Errikos Ventouras, Pantelis A. Asvestas, Nikolaos Smyrnis, Kostas Marias and George K. Matsopoulos
  Signals 2021, 2(1), 55–71; doi:10.3390/signals2010006

• An Educational Guide through the FMP Notebooks for Teaching and Learning Fundamentals of Music Processing
  By Meinard Müller
  Signals 2021, 2(2), 245–285; doi:10.3390/signals2020018

Symmetry:

• Hadronic and Hadron-Like Physics of Dark Matter
  By Vitaly Beylin, Maxim Yu. Khlopov, Vladimir Kuksa and Nikolay Volchanskiy
  Symmetry 2019, 11(4), 587; doi:10.3390/sym11040587

• Role of Asymmetric Autocatalysis in the Elucidation of Origins of Homochirality of Organic Compounds
  By Kenso Soai, Tsuneomi Kawasaki and Arimasa Matsumoto
  Symmetry 2019, 11(5), 694; doi:10.3390/sym11050694

• Convenient Asymmetric Synthesis of Fmoc-(S)-6,6,6-Trifluoro-Norleucine
  By Haibo Mei, Zizhen Yin, Toshio Miwa, Hiroki Moriwaki, Hidenori Abe, Jianlin Han and Vadim A. Soloshonok
  Symmetry 2019, 11(4), 578; doi:10.3390/sym11040578

• CMB Tensions with Low-Redshift H₀ and S₈ Measurements: Impact of a Redshift-Dependent Type-Ia Supernovae Intrinsic Luminosity
  By Matteo Martinelli and Isaac Tutusaus
  Symmetry 2019, 11(8), 986; doi:10.3390/sym11080986

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Section “Network Virtualization and Edge/Fog Computing”. We look forward to his contributions to Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903).

Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista is a full professor of distributed and mobile systems at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI), Alma Mater Studiorum—Università di Bologna.

His primary research interests relate to middleware for mobile computing, Internet of Things platforms, efficient integrations of sensors–edge–cloud, edge/fog computing, mobile pervasive applications for Industry 4.0, and smart cities/communities.

In addition to national/EU project participation (he is currently the scientific coordinator of the H2020 IoTwins project—https://www.iotwins.eu/) and publication activities, among the notable services for his community, he is Editor-in-Chief of the MDPI journal Computers (since 2017), Section Editor-in-Chief of MDPI’s Future Internet, and member of the Editorial Boards of IEEE Communication Surveys and Tutorials (since 2019), ACM Computing Surveys (since 2020), IEEE Transactions on Computers (2011-2015), IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (since 2011), IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (2008-2017), IEEE Communications Magazine (2003-2011), Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal (since 2010), Elsevier’s Journal on Network and Computing Applications (since 2015), Springer’s Journal of Network and Systems Management (since 2008), and MDPI’s Sensors (since 2017).

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista, who shared his vision for the journal with us, as well as his views of the research area and open access publishing:

1. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to take the role as its Section Editor-in-Chief?
Future Internet is a journal with a very interesting and exciting focus, with growing visibility and relevance in the international community of researchers and practitioners in the field. I was very happy to have the opportunity to contribute to it, also with my new role as "Network Virtualization and Edge/Fog Computing" Section Editor-in-Chief. This new Section represents a technically challenging, intriguing, and extremely active research sub-field these days, with enormous potential in terms of both novel methodologies/models/algorithms/middleware and innovative efficient applications of it.

2. What is your vision for the journal?
This new Section of the journal has the ambition to become an international reference point for researchers working on future Internet aspects of virtualization and cloud continuum. It will be the home for original technical proposals at the methodological/modeling/algorithmic level, for the presentation of novel middleware and infrastructures of solution (with simulation and experimental evidence of successful deployment), and for the discussion of real application cases and associated performance results about efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability, as well as the home for survey/tutorial papers about emerging trends in the field.

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?
Network virtualization and edge/fog computing will be the center of the future Internet world that we are building. This is pushed not only by technical motivations (reduction in costs, softwarization trends, efficiency, sustainability, and scalability, among others), but also by economical and strategic ones, e.g., increased sovereignty on data and distributed cloud continuum infrastructures. Technically supporting these evolutionary lines with high efficiency and quality control is the most relevant technical challenge for the near future of this field of research.

4. What do you think of the development of open access in the publishing field?
Flexibility and variety of opportunities are a must for future publications. In this variegated and multi-publisher scenario, a very relevant role is played by open access, which guarantees maximum democratic access to research results, crucial for open innovation, and not only this. In addition, it is important to highlight that the future Internet is and will be a very relevant research area also in terms of public funding, which by design requires public results of publicly funded research to be maximally accessible to all citizens and interested stakeholders. Additionally, in this perspective, Future Internet can play a relevant role for the community in the field.

We wish Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista every success in his new position, and we look forward to his contributions to the journal.

We are pleased to let you know that Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) has received an increased CiteScore of 5.4 (an increase of 31.7% compared to the last year), published by Elsevier in June 2022. Future Internet now ranks Q2 (92/359) in the “Computer Networks and Communications” category. For full details on the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's source profile.

We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to the authors, editors, and reviewers for their contributions. We are grateful for your excellent work that has helped us to achieve this milestone for Future Internet!

To read more and submit to our journal, please visit the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet.

Future Internet Editorial Office

The 2021 citation metrics have been officially released in Scopus!

We are pleased to announce that 182 MDPI journals are included, of which:

● 21 journals received their first CiteScore.
● 85% of journals increased their CiteScore from 2020.
● 155 journals (85%) ranked above average, in at least one category.

The following 65 MDPI journals (36%) ranked among the top 25% of journals, in at least one category:

Source: 2021 CiteScores™ (Elsevier)

2021 was a year of growth for Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903). In 2021, we received 797 submissions, published 313 articles from 1134 international authors, and 681 experts were involved in reviewing articles for Future Internet. Moreover, a total of 15 new Editorial Board Members joined us, and the number of Editorial Board Members increased to 134. So far, there are also 61 Topical Advisory Panel Members and 183 Reviewer Board Members. Future Internet’s articles were cited 2188 times in 2021. Thanks to the commitment and dedication of the editorial staff, the median time between submission and publication was around 34 days.

We believe Future Internet will continue to attract more and more authors from all over the world who appreciate its very efficient peer review and publishing processes.

Most Cited Papers

• “IoT for Smart Cities: Machine Learning Approaches in Smart Healthcare—A Review”
  by Taher M. Ghazal et al.

• “Survey of Localization for Internet of Things Nodes: Approaches, Challenges and Open Issues”
  by Sheetal Ghorpade et al.

• “User Acceptance of Smart Watch for Medical Purposes: An Empirical Study”
  by Rana Saeed Al-Maroof et al.

• “Protection from ‘Fake News’: The Need for Descriptive Factual Labeling for Online Content”
  by Matthew Spradling et al.

• “Networked Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Surveillance and Monitoring: A Survey”
  by Xiaohui Li and Andrey V. Savkin

Collections/Special Issues

Future Internet runs Special Issues to create collections of papers on specific topics. The aim is to build a community of authors and readers to discuss the latest research and develop new ideas and research directions. Special Issues are led by Guest Editors who are experts in the subject and oversee the editorial process for papers. Papers published in a Special Issue will be collected together on a dedicated page of the journal website.

Hot Special Issues

• “Data Science and Knowledge Discovery”;
• “Education 4.0 in the Transformation of Universities: Educational and Research Applications”;
• “Wireless Internet, Multimedia, and Artificial Intelligence: New Applications and Infrastructures”;
• “Digital and Social Media in the Disinformation Age”.

Open Calls

• Topical Collection “Innovative People-Centered Solutions Applied to Industries, Cities and Societies”
  edited by Dino Giuli and Carlos Filipe Da Silva Portela

• Topical Collection “Featured Reviews of Future Internet Research”
  edited by Dino Giuli

• Topical Collection “Machine Learning Approaches for User Identity”
  edited by Kaushik Roy, Mustafa Atay and Ajita Rattani

• Topical Collection “Information Systems Security”
  edited by Luis Javier Garcia Villalba

You can see the full list of call for papers at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/special_issues.

On behalf of the editorial team, we would like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief of Future Internet, Editorial Board Members, Guest Editors, Topical Advisory Panel Members, and Reviewer Board Members, all of whom have ensured the continued success of the journal through their hard work and diligence.

We believe that Future Internet will continue to contribute to academic exchange and the sharing of knowledge in 2022.

Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) is currently recruiting Editorial Board Members for the following six Sections:

• “Internet of Things”;
• “Big Data and Augmented Intelligence”;
• “Techno-Social Smart Systems”;
• “Smart System Infrastructure and Applications”;
• “Network Virtualization and Edge/Fog Computing”;
• “Cybersecurity”.

A list of current Editorial Board Members can be viewed at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/editors. If you are interested in applying for this position, or would like to recommend potential candidates, please contact the Future Internet Editorial Office ([email protected]) for further details.

Future Internet is a scholarly, peer-reviewed, open access journal on Internet technologies and information society, which is published monthly online by MDPI. It is indexed within Scopus, ESCI (Web of Science), Ei Compendex, dblp, Inspec, and many other databases.

Future Internet received an increased CiteScore of 4.10 in the released 2020 CiteScore™ values, published by Elsevier in June 2020. As such, Future Internet ranked 104 out of 334 titles (Q2) in “Computer Networks and Communications”.

The benefits of being an Editorial Board Member include the following:

• Publishing one paper free of charge per year in Future Internet, and being granted potential discounts for additional papers you invite;
• A recognition certificate as an Editorial Board Member of Future Internet;
• Future Internet will offer additional sponsorships for conferences organized by Editorial Board Members.

The Responsibilities of Editorial Board Members include the following:

• Supervising the editorial process, including prescreening submissions and making final decisions on whether to accept or reject papers;
• Contributing your own work and inviting three papers to Future Internet (the Editorial Office will prepare a list of potential authors and the invitation template);
• Editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research or recommending potential topics and Guest Editors.

If you are interested in becoming an Editorial Board Member of Future Internet, please send your application, including a full academic CV, to the Future Internet Editorial Office ([email protected]). We look forward to working with you in the future.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Fabrizio Marozzo has joined Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) as a new Topical Advisory Panel Member.

Dr. Fabrizio Marozzo has worked as an Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering at the DIMES Department, University of Calabria, Italy, since 2019. He also co-founded DtoK Lab S.r.l., an academic spin-off of University of Calabria, in 2014.

His current research focuses on big data analysis, social media analysis, parallel and distributed computing, cloud computing, intelligent systems and programming models.

He has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Access journal and the International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications (IJISTA) and as an Editor of Big Data and Cognitive Computing (MDPI), Algorithms (MDPI), Frontiers in Big Data, Heliyon (Elsevier) and the International Journal of Big Data Intelligence (IJBDI). He has published many scientific papers, including the book Data Analysis in the Cloud.

In July 2018, he obtained the Italian National Academic Qualification (Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale) as Associate Professor (Professore Associato) in the field of Information Processing Systems (Sistemi di Elaborazione delle Informazioni – SC 09/H1 – SSD ING-INF/05) and Computer Technology (Informatica – SC 01/B1 – SSD INF/01).

We wish him every success both in his research and in developing the journal.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Carlos Filipe Da Silva Portela and Prof. Dr. Vijayakumar Varadarajan have joined Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) as Editorial Board Members.

Dr. Carlos Filipe Da Silva Portela was born in Trofa, Portugal, and went to the University of Minho in Guimarães, where he studied information systems and obtained degrees in 2007 (Lic.), 2009 (M.Sc.), and 2013 (Ph.D.). He obtained his Ph.D. in information systems and technologies in 2013. He belongs to the research center ALGORITMI, where he developed his post-doctoral research work on the topic "Pervasive Intelligent Decision Support Systems". His research was started in the INTCare R&D project (Intensive Medicine area), being then extended to education and public administration areas. He already has relevant indexed publications in the following research topics: intelligent decision support systems, intelligent systems, pervasive data, business intelligence, data mining, and knowledge discovery. He has also been co-organizer of several workshops and a reviewer of many indexed journals and conferences on these topics. Currently, he is also an Invited Assistant Professor of the Information Systems Department, School of Engineering, University of Minho, Portugal, where he has been supervising several master students in the abovementioned areas. Dr. Portela founded IOTech—Innovation on Technology, in 2018. Through IOTech, he is transferring and applying scientific knowledge to benefit citizens.

Since becoming a researcher in 2008, he has worked in the medicine field and, more recently, in public administration and higher education. Several relevant results were achieved with his research and participation in projects, the following being the most relevant:

• ioCOVID19—Intelligent decision support platform;
• TechTeach—An innovative method to increase students’ engagement in classrooms;
• ioScience—An offline data science method;
• INTCare—A pervasive intelligent decision support system for intensive care;
• DEM—Deus ex machina.

He also participated in several conferences as a presenter and session chair. Simultaneously, he is a member of scientific and program committees (conferences, books, and journals).

Prof. Dr. Vijayakumar Varadarajan is currently an Adjunct Professor in School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is also a Data Science Advisor for Brite Yellow Pvt Ltd United Kingdom and President and Founder of Global Students Nest. He was a Professor and Associate Dean for the School of Computing Science and Engineering at VIT University, Chennai, India. He has more than 18 years of experience, industrial and institutional. He also served as a Team Leader in industries such as Satyam, Mahindra Satyam, and Tech Mahindra for several years. He has completed a diploma with first class honors. He completed his BE CSE and MBA HRD with first class. He also completed his ME CSE with first rank award. He obtained a Ph.D. from Anna University in 2012. He has published many articles in national and international level journals/conferences/books. He is a reviewer in IEEE Transactions, Inderscience and Springer journals. He has initiated a number of international research collaborations with universities in Europe, Australia, Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, and North and South America. He also initiated joint research collaborations between VIT University and various industries. He is also the Leading Guest Editor for a few journals in Inderscience, Springer, Elsevier, IOS, UM, and IGI Global. He has also organized several international conferences and special sessions in USA, Vietnam, Africa, Malaysia, and India including ARCI, IEEE, ACSAT, ISRC, ISBCC, ICBCC, etc. His research interests include computational areas covering grid computing, cloud computing, computer networks, cyber security, and big data. He received his university-level Best Faculty Award for 2015–2016. He is also a member of several national and international professional bodies including IFSA, EAI, BIS, ISTE, IAENG, CSTA, IEA, etc.

We wish them every success in their new position, and we look forward to their contributions to the journal.

It is our pleasure to announce that Dr. Jun Luo, Dr. Enrique Herrera-Viedma, Dr. Sherali Zeadally, Dr. Guan Gui, and Dr. Houbing Song, who are the Editorial Board Members of Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) have been listed for the 2021 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Dr. Jun Luo currently works at the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, where he is an Assistant Professor. He is a member of ACM and IEEE. Dr. Jun Luo researches mobile and distributed computing, deep learning and computer vision, and applied operations research. His current focuses lie in 1) contact-free sensing driven by deep learning, 2) visible light communication and sensing, 3) indoor and outdoor localization and tracking, and 4) application of machine learning to mobile computing and networking.

Dr. Enrique Herrera-Viedma is the Vice President for publications in the Systems, Man, and Cybernetic Society and an Associate Editor of several journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transport System, Information Sciences, Applied Soft Computing, Soft Computing, Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Making, and Knowledge-Based Systems. His h-index is 81 on the Web of Science, with more than 23 000 citations received, and 97 on Google Scholar, with more than 37 000 citations received. He has been identified as one of the world’s most influential researchers by the Shanghai Center and Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics in both computer science and engineering for the years 2014–2020.

Dr. Sherali Zeadally is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (2018–2020), as well as an ACM Distinguished Speaker (2017–2020). He has co-authored or authored more than 350 peer-reviewed publications, and over 235 of these publications have appeared in peer-reviewed, high-impact international journals/magazines. Furthermore, he has edited or co-authored 7 books, which have been published by well-known publishers (Springer, CRC press, and IET). Dr. Zeadally is the Editor-in-Chief of a peer-reviewed international journal, and has acted as an Editorial Board Member or Associate Editor for over 30 peer-reviewed international journals. At the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky, he has been recognized as one of the most highly cited researchers in the world.

Dr. Guan Gui was recognized as one of the 2020 Highly Cited Chinese Researchers in wireless communications. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, IEICE Transactions on Communications, Physical Communication, Wireless Networks, IEEE Access, Journal of Circuits, Systems, and Computers, Security and Communication Networks, IEICE Communications Express, KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems, and Journal of Communications.

Dr. Houbing Song is a senior member of ACM, an ACM Distinguished Speaker, the faculty advisor of ERAU chapter of ACM’s Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE), and a senior member of IEEE. Dr. Song was a recipient of the Best Paper Award from the 12th IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical, and Social Computing (CPSCom-2019), the Best Paper Award from the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Industrial Internet (ICII 2019), the Best Paper Award from the 19th IEEE/AIAA Integrated Communication, Navigation, and Surveillance technologies (ICNS 2019) Conference, the Best Paper Award from the 6th IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing (CBDCom 2020), and the Best Paper Award from the 15th International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA 2020).

Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903) is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes original articles and critical reviews on Internet technologies and related smart systems for “Net-Living” development.

The Future Internet editorial team is pleased to announce this open call for Special Issue proposals, which gives a group of authors the opportunity to work on an interconnected set of papers on an innovative topic. We would like to solicit high-quality proposals that will be evaluated in a competitive procedure on a rolling basis throughout the year.

Proposals within the scope of the journal are welcome. For more details, please see: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/about.

If you would like to propose a Special Issue topic for this journal, please click the following link, and complete and submit the form: https://www.mdpi.com/journalproposal/sendproposalspecialissue/futureinternet. Our editors will get back to you shortly.

The duties and benefits of acting as a Guest Editor are as follows:

• Publishing both a review paper and a research paper free of charge in the Special Issue and potential discount for additional papers you invite;
• Redefining the title and scope of the Special Issue;
• Circulating the call for papers for the Special Issue and inviting submissions;
• Making decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted or not based on the reports we collect;
• Promoting the Special Issue and increasing its visibility at related academic conferences;
• If five or more papers are published in this Special Issue, we can make a Special Issue book and send a hard copy to each guest editor.

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

Please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office ([email protected]) for further details and clarifications.

We look forward to receiving your proposals.

Future Internet Editorial Office

It is our great honor to congratulate the Editorial Board Members and Editors in MDPI's journals who have been distinguished as 2021 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate, according to Web of Science data. We herewith express our gratitude for the immense impact the named researchers continue to make on scientific progress and on our journals' development.

Clarivate's annual list of Highly Cited Researchers^TM identifies the most highly cited scientists for the past decade. Their impactful papers are among the top 1 per cent in the citation distribution of one or more of 22 fields analyzed in the "Essential Science Indicators", distinguishing them as hugely influential among their peers.

The full list of 2021 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed at the following webpage in the Web of Science^TM https://recognition.webofscience.com/awards/highly-cited/2021/.

--- Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) is a Clarivate product.

Academic editors play a crucial role in leading our journals and ensuring that each article undergoes a robust and timely peer-review. With the launch of Topics this year and addition of Topic Editors to our family of academic editors, we decided it would be a good time to restructure our academic boards, thus providing more clarity and support for each role. MDPI is pleased to announce the launch of a new position—Topical Advisory Panel Member, that will replace the previous position of Topics Board Member. The Topical Advisory Panel will be comprised of early career researchers eager to gain experience in editorial work.

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.

Each year, the members’ performances are evaluated, and outstanding members are 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, please contact the editorial office by email.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

MDPI will be attending the 2021 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) from 7 to 11 December 2021, in Madrid, Spain.

With the theme “Connecting Cultures around the Globe”, this flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society will feature a comprehensive, high-quality technical program, including 12 symposia, selected areas in communications tracking, and a variety of tutorials and workshops. IEEE GLOBECOM 2021 will also introduce an attractive industry program aimed at practitioners, with keynotes and panels from prominent research, industry and government leaders, business and industry panels, and vendor exhibits.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Sensors;
• Future Internet;
• Technologies;
• Drones;
• ASI.

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth, B5. Our delegate looks forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit the following website: https://globecom2021.ieee-globecom.org/.

Founded in 1996, MDPI was one of the first fully Open Access publisher. Over 25 years MDPI has grown to become the largest Open Access publisher globally, publishing over 160,000 articles across more than 350 journals in 2020. At the core, MDPI was founded in response to a pressing need of fast publication and inclusion. The scholar was set at the centre of the publication process for the first time. Acting as a service provider, rather than a product provider, MDPI exists to help scientists achive their objective to disseminate research results. At MDPI, we believe scientists deserve a better service from the publishing world.

The International Open Access Week (Open Access Week), founded by the SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Alliance and student partners in 2008, has been successfully running for 13 years. As an advocate and pioneer of open access publishing, MDPI actively responds to the call of International Open Access Week. This year’s theme of “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity” highlights the Recommendation’s call for equitable participation from all authors and readers.

For the last 25 years, MDPI has been committed to disseminating open research. Here is a video showing MDPI’s Commitment to Equity, Inclusion and Diversity for More than 25 Years.

International Open Access Week is an important opportunity to catalyze new conversations, create connections across and between communities that can facilitate this co-design, and advance progress in the building of more equitable foundations for opening knowledge—discussions and actions that need to be continued, year in and year out. MDPI has always aimed to provide professional and efficient publishing services to scholars around the world.

Our mission is to make scientific research accessible to everyone; this year, we interview and hold discussions with open science ambassadors on how to build an equal and inclusive environment for open science. Academic editors help us collaborate with more institutions to advocate for open access ideas.

Read our anniversary blog post: "Sharing 'Collective Human Knowledge': The Benefits of Open Access Publication"

Besides this, our scientific community is a key driver of our success and MDPI’s remarkable growth. Despite the pandemic, we have prepared online conferences and workshops to gather scholars from different communities.

The Basel Sustainable Publishing online forum provides an equal opportunity for stakeholders and researchers from multi-cultural environments to exchange ideas and eliminate barriers to participation.

Conference date: 25 October 2021, online
Conference website: https://bspf2021.sciforum.net/
Main topics: MDPI discusses the current dilemma of open access science from various perspectives such as governments, libraries, and publishers, and related measures on how to change the status quo of discrimination from a global perspective.

We aim to support equality, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications. We collaborate with universities and key laboratories and have scholarly communications with researchers, teachers, and students on open access workshops.

• 25 October 2021
  Energies journal and Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

• 28 October 2021
  Machines journal and State Key Laboratory of Traction Power, Southwest Jiaotong University

• 29 October 2021
  Processes journal and Beijing Institute of Technology

• 29 October 2021
  Coatings journal and Wuhan University of Technology

MDPI is committed to providing open access and high-quality publishing services for scholars and promoting rapid dissemination of academic achievements. We hope to promote the practices and policies of open access publishing and diversify the dissemination of academic achievements.

The journal Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903) is recruiting a Topical Advisory Panel (TAP). TAP Members are expected to provide support to Guest Editors, Topic Editors, and Section Board Members. The responsibilities of the reviewers are here.

Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903, indexed by Scopus, Ei Compendex, ESCI-Web of Science) is a journal on Internet technologies and the information society. It maintains a rigorous and fast peer review system with a median publication time of 35 days from submission to online publication, and 3 days from acceptance to publication. On Scopus, Future Internet ranks 104th out of 334 (Q2) in the “Computer Networks and Communications” category. The aims and scope of the journal can be found here.

Benefits: Topical Advisory Panel Members are encouraged to apply for travel grants for their research group or themselves after one year of their tenure has been served. Moreover, they may be recommended for the role of Editorial Board Member after the Editorial Office's evaluation.

If you are interested in becoming a Topical Advisory Panel Member of Future Internet, please send your application, including a full academic CV, to the Future Internet Editorial Office ([email protected]).

For more information about Future Internet, please visit the website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet.

We are pleased to announce that 5 new scholars have recently been appointed as Editorial Board Members (EBMs) for the journal Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903).

We wish them every success both in their research and in the development of the journal.

Further details about the Editorial Board can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/editors.

Rigorous peer-review is the cornerstone of high-quality academic publishing. Over 369,916 scholars served as reviewers for MDPI journals in 2020. We are extremely appreciative of all those who made a contribution to the editorial process in this capacity. At the beginning of every year, journal editorial offices publish a list of all reviewers’ names to express our gratitude. In addition, this year, the MDPI Top Reviewer Award was announced, to recognize the very best reviewers for their expertise and dedication, and their high-quality, and timely review reports. We are pleased to announce the following winners of the 2020 MDPI Top Reviewer Award:

• Adriana Burlea-Schiopoiu;
• Alban Kuriqi;
• Álvaro González-Vila;
• Alessandro Alaimo;
• Alexey Beskopylny;
• Alexander Yu Churyumov;
• Alberto Fernández-Isabel;
• Andrea Mastinu;
• Antonios N. Papadopoulos;
• Anton Rassõlkin;
• Antonio Humberto Hamad Minervino;
• Arkadiusz Matwijczuk;
• Artur Słomka;
• Baojie He;
• Bartłomiej Potaniec;
• Bojan Đurin;
• Camilo Arturo Rodriguez Diaz;
• Carmelo Maria Musarella;
• Chiachung Chen;
• Chiman Kwan;
• Cristian Busu;
• Danil Pimenov;
• Dan-Cristian Dabija;
• Delfín Ortega-Sánchez;
• Demetrio Antonio Zema;
• Denis Butusov;
• Elena Lucchi;
• Gaurab Dutta;
• Livia Anastasiu;
• M. R. Safaei.

For more information about how to become a reviewer of MDPI journals, please see: www.mdpi.com/reviewers.

Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903) is a scholarly, peer-reviewed, open access journal on Internet technologies and the information society, published monthly online by MDPI. Because it is an open access journal, papers published receive high levels of publicity. Future Internet is indexed by ESCI, Scopus (CiteScore 4.1), etc. The Future Internet website can be accessed at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet.

Given the prospect of open access repositories and especially the vigorous development of Future Internet, we are now recruiting Guest Editors (GEs) for this journal, in the following macro-areas. The detailed topics can be found at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/about.

• Macro-Area 1: Smart System Technologies and Architecture;
• Macro-Area 2: Smart Systems and Applications;
• Macro-Area 3: Net-Living Human Factors and Quality of Life Enhancement.

As a GE, you will have the following responsibilities and opportunities:

• Serving as the editor of Special Issues on topics related to your critical research interests, at your convenience;
• Deciding whether a manuscript qualifies for acceptance in a Special Issue, according to MDPI criteria;
• Promoting Future Internet at academic events to increase its visibility within related academic fields;
• Inviting paper submissions and enjoying our premium editorial service at any time.

It is our pleasure to receive applications from leading experts in the aforementioned academic fields. We welcome and encourage you to apply.

You can submit your application directly via the link here.

If you have any questions before or after applying, please do not hesitate to contact us ([email protected]).

UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. In 2020 the SDG Publishers Compact was launched, aimed to inspire publishers and accelerate progress to achieve the 17 goals by 2030. Members of the programme are committed to support the publication of materials that will promote and inspire actions towards SDGs.

MDPI is an eager advocate of SDGs and has already been supporting the programme by creating Special Issues and publishing a series of books on SDGs prior to joining the Compact in 2021. MDPI's Sustainability Foundation initiated the World Sustainability Awards in 2016. We fully support UN's goals to promote sustainable actions that make the world a better place for all and, as part of its commitment, we will focus our actions on SDG10: Reduced Inequalities whilst promoting all 17 SDGs. For more details, please visit the programme’s website: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sdg-publishers-compact/.

Joining this initiative was a unanimous decision. MDPI has in its core values the dissemination of science for all, breaking the wall between research access and under-represented members of the scientific community and the general population. To support this initiative further and continue to support under-represented scientists, MDPI will take a series of actions that will be announced once ready.

The first action MDPI takes is to nominate Dr. Liliane Auwerter as the coordinator of the programme. Dr. Auwerter studied Environmental Process Technology (UTFPR, Brazil), obtained her MSc degree in Water and Environmental Engineering (University of Surrey, UK) and in 2020 completed her PhD in self-healing low-friction materials for water transport (Imperial College London, UK), always focusing on diverse scientific projects that would potentially bring sustainability to industrial processes. As a student in Brazil, she engaged in volunteering activities focused on environmental education and took part in the Millennial Development Goals meetings held at the university.

For more information, please contact:
Dr. Liliane Auwerter
Scientific Officer
[email protected]

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

Dear Colleagues,

As the Editor-in-Chief of Future Internet, I am pleased to announce the winner of the Future Internet 2021 Best Paper Award.

The award has been granted to one research article:

• “A Review of Machine Learning and IoT in Smart Transportation”
  by Fotios Zantalis, Grigorios Koulouras, Sotiris Karabetsos, and Dionisis Kandris
  Volume 11, Issue 4, doi: 10.3390/fi11040094

The corresponding authors will receive CHF 500 and a chance to publish a paper free of charge in Future Internet in 2021. On behalf of the Assessment Committee, I would like to congratulate the winners on their accomplishment. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of the nominated research groups of the above exceptional paper for their contributions to Future Internet and thank the Award Committee for voting and helping with the award.

Prof. Dr. Dino Giuli
Editor-in-Chief of Future Internet

MDPI will be attending the 2021 CCF Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CCFAI 2021), which is to be held in Yantai, China, on 22–25 July 2021. As one of the most important academic conferences in the field of artificial intelligence in China, CCFAI aims to provide an interactive communication platform for practitioners in artificial intelligence, accelerating the exchange of latest research results and knowledge, as well as improving the research level in artificial intelligence.

The following MDPI journals will be represented at the meeting:

• Electronics;
• BDCC;
• Information;
• ASI;
• Future Internet.

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth. Our delegates are looking forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions you may have.

For more information about the conference, please visit: https://ccfai2021.ytu.edu.cn/.

Future Internet has received an increased CiteScore of 4.10 in the latest released 2020 CiteScore™ values, published by Elsevier in June 2021. Future Internet now ranks Q2 (104/307) in the category “Computer Networks and Communications”. For full details of the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile: https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100409311.

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.

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)

Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903), an open access journal published monthly online by MDPI, recently published its 1000th article since the journal’s inception in 2009. On behalf of the editorial team, we would like to express our gratitude to the Editors-in-Chief of Future Internet, Prof. Dr. Dino Giuli and Prof. Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith, all Section Editors-in-Chief and Editorial Board Members, as well as to the Guest Editors of Special Issues, Topic Board Members, and Reviewer Board Members, all of whom have ensured the continued success of the journal through their hard work and diligence.

Future Internet is now covered in the Ei Compendex, Scopus, and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI - Web of Science), from Vol. 9.

According to CiteScore Tracker 2020, as of December 2020 Future Internet is receiving a real-time CiteScore of 3.6. For the full details in the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile (https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100409311).

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.

At MDPI we have slightly revised the layout for articles to be published in the 2021 Volume, starting at the end of December 2020. As of today, the article templates available for download on ‘Instructions for Authors’ pages have been updated.

The most noticeable change can be found on the first page of the article, where a left-hand column has been created to include the following front matter elements: (i) the recommended citation style for the article, (ii) the publishing history, (iii) as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license used (iv) a standard note regarding affiliations. At the same time, the extra spacing on the left means the authors’ affiliations are now more clearly set apart than before. Other front matter key elements such as journal logo, article type, article title, authors, abstract and keywords remain unchanged.

The blank column on the left runs through all pages in an article; as a result, the main text is slightly more condensed, which improve reader friendliness for smaller screens. Small figures/tables are aligned on the left with standard indenture, while large figures/tables are centered and covering the full width of the page. The revised layout was applied in the article pictured below, to serve as an example:

1) Information is displayed in the left information bar.

2) In the main text, there is a blank column on the left.

3) Small tables/figures are aligned on the left, large tables/figures are centered.

We are pleased to acknowledge that many academic editors who have made an impact on MDPI journals as editorial board members, editors-in-chief, or section editors, are recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Highly Cited Researchers highlights the top 1% of researchers, by citations, in one or more of the 22 fields used in Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We offer our congratulations to 279 academic editors of MDPI journals who were recognized as the most influential scholars in their fields in 2020.

The full list of 2020 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed on https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2020/

--- Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) is a Clarivate product.

Future Internet has received an increased CiteScore of 2.80 in the latest released 2019 CiteScore™ values, published by Elsevier in June 2020. Future Internet now ranks Q2 (133/307) in the category "Computer Networks and Communications".

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our Open Access agreement with Jisc Collections, which will allow UK institutions to benefit from access to article processing charge (APC) discounts and streamlined payment workflows.

All institutions participating in the agreement will also gain access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information for easy identification and additional transparency.

Eligible 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.

About Jisc

Jisc's vision is for the UK to be the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the world. At its heart is the super-fast national research and education network, Janet, with built-in cyber security protection.  Jisc also provides technology solutions for its members (colleges, universities and research centres) and customers (public sector bodies), helps members save time and money by negotiating sector-wide deals and provides advice and practical assistance on digital technology. Jisc is funded by the UK higher and further education and research funding bodies and member institutions.

For more information, contact [email protected]

About MDPI

MDPI is a publisher of fully peer-reviewed, Open Access journals with a focus on thorough and rapid editorial processing. Its aim is to ensure that high-quality research is verified and made available to the research community as quickly as possible. MDPI stands at the forefront of the Open Access movement, having launched its first online journal Molecules in 1996. Today, MDPI is a leader in Open Access publishing with over 250 journals across all research disciplines, and all content published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

For any questions about this agreement, please contact the MDPI IOAP team at [email protected].

Since 1996, MDPI has been committed to supporting the research community by providing the latest research freely available and making relevant and useful research available as quickly as possible. The world is current experiencing a pandemic of COVID-19, and researchers are working extremely hard to understand it and find a cure.

The values MDPI holds strongly are particularly important at the moment, and we will continue to publish relevant, peer-reviewed research as quickly as possible in open access format. This means that it will immediately be available for researchers, health professionals, and the general public to read, distribute, and reuse. We believe that scientific advancements will be crucial to overcoming this pandemic, and will do everything we can to support researchers working looking for solutions.

COVID-19 Academic Resources Center contains a variety of information related to COVID-19 available from MDPI, including journal articles, special issues, and preprints, among others.

For more information, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/covid-19

As a leading Open Access publisher, MDPI is committed to fostering open scientific exchange in all forms across all disciplines. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, many researchers have to stay at home and many academic conferences have been cancelled or postponed. In light of these changes, MDPI has adopted numerous initiatives that may help accelerate scientific exchange and provide support to the academics during this period.

Scholarly Community—Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia 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.

Comprehensive and Free Literature Database—Scilit

Scilit is a comprehensive, free database for scientists that uses a new method to collate data and index scientific material. Our crawlers extract the latest data from CrossRef and PubMed on a daily basis. This means that newly published articles are immediately added to Scilit.

Display Academic Achievements—SciProfiles

SciProfiles is an innovative social network for researchers and scholars that is developed by MDPI. In line with our broad mission, the purpose of SciProfiles is to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and providing opportunities for academic networking.

Organize and Participate in Conferences Online—Sciforum

Sciforum is an event planning platform that supports open science by offering the opportunity to host and participate in academic conferences. It provides an environment for scholarly exchange, discussion of topics of current interest, building of networks, and establishing collaborations.

Post Early Versions of Research Outputs—Preprints

Preprints is a platform dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable. We post original research articles and comprehensive reviews, and papers can be updated by authors at any time. Content on Preprints is not peer-reviewed, and feedback can be received from readers.

***

MDPI remains committed to open science and open data and has signed a statement, along with more than thirty scholarly publishers, showing our intention to facilitate sharing of new research findings as early on as possible. The initiative sees publishers collectively removing barriers to new research, in the face of a global healthcare crisis.

The world is currently suffering from a global pandemic of the corona virus COVID-19. MDPI expresses its sympathies for all of those affected by the virus and stands in solidarity with medical staff and researchers treating patients and searching for scientific solutions.

MDPI has previously published papers covering corona viruses in addition to new papers on the current outbreak, see all papers here. In particular, Viruses has published a number of Special Issues and papers on the topic (see here, here, and here) as well as a forthcoming Special Issue.

Alongside journal articles, MDPI has been a strong supporter of preprints, which are increasingly being used to rapidly disseminate the latest research, and we run the preprint server Preprints.org. Our database of research articles, Scilit, is free to use and covers all publishers including preprint servers. New papers are often in search results within hours of publication and users can set up alerts for new papers.

Our main priority during this period has been the health and safety of staff, and we continue to allow staff to work at home and closely monitor the situation in all locations in which we work. Despite the restrictions, we continue to provide a full publication service and, by close collaboration with our editorial boards and making use our in-house teams, ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in publishing vital research. Fast and open publication has always been at the core of MDPI values and is now more important than ever.

We hope that a solution to the current situation will emerge soon. In the meantime, we will do our best to continue communicating vital research in all fields.

The advantages of the open access model of scientific publishing are being increasingly recognized in the scientific community. It allows new scientific evidence to be accessed from the moment of publication for free by anyone around the globe, boosting the impact of new research. In response, many funders, libraries and universities have been adopting new principles to accelerate the transition to open access.

Recently, “transformative agreements” have been negotiated between traditional publishers and various institutions. While increasing the number of open access papers, these agreements lack binding commitments to a full transition to open access, their conditions vary across different regions, and access is still limited for many users.

MDPI is a co-signatory of the recent position statement raising concerns about potential downsides of transformative agreements and how they may delay a full transition to open access. The statement highlights that these models “risk perpetuating current limitations on access, transparency and market competitiveness, while simultaneously facilitating excessive charges on the public purse”.

As a pioneering open access journal publisher, MDPI is the first to promote the importance of science being made available to everyone. Our peer-reviewed journals, covering diverse academic disciplines, are fully accessible to the public free of charge under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). This is why, along with other open access publishers, MDPI is a proud signatory of the position paper and is committed to contributing to the replacement of weak transitional agreements with “agreements with publishers that are already fully committed to open science and who offer full, immediate and transparent Open Access”.

Read the position paper here

We are pleased to announce that Encyclopedia will be awarding five Outstanding Contributor Awards for researchers in 2020. The nominations and applications will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee consisting of senior scholars from the Encyclopedia Editorial Board.

Prize for Winners

1. An official certificate;
2. A cash award of 500 CHF or an MDPI discount voucher of 800 CHF.

Application Deadline

31 December, 2020 (Please send your application email with a list of all entries you contributed to our office before the deadline: [email protected])

Candidate Requirements

1. Have a Ph.D. degree;
2. Have more than three qualified entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020.

Evaluation Standards

1. Number of entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020;
2. Quality of entries online (including length, figure quality, and novelty);
3. Impact of entries (including the number of likes, discussion contents, views, and downloads).

If you are a researcher and have not yet contribute entries to Encyclopedia, please do not miss this chance to highlight your research results.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of SciProfiles, its social network platform for researchers and scholars.

The purpose of SciProfiles is aligned with MDPI’s broad mission to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and to serve scholars and communities by providing opportunities for academic networking.

SciProfiles also ambitions to serve as a sustainable, transparent and community-driven research evaluation system aligned with the DORA principles (https://sfdora.org/). Through their scientific profiles, academics can highlight their contribution to research communities, and measure their impact on their field, beyond publication numbers and impact factors. SciProfiles is currently a beta version and will enrich to give researchers the possibility to highlight all of their contributions to science and their scientific communities as authors, reviewers, editors, conference organizers, conference panelists, conference keynote speakers, or even as lecturers or student mentors at their University.

The classic components of popular community social networks, including follower/following, classical metrics, endorsements and recommendations (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1690), comments (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397) are or will be very soon highlighted in SciProfiles as open science contributions.

To help increase the impact and visibility of articles and their authors to an appropriate audience, the platform offers a NewsFeed that includes recommendations of relevant content based on interests, publication history, saved searches or colleagues’ recommendations.

SciProfiles’ avatars are now being integrated on several MDPI platforms, meaning that you will directly access researchers’ profiles from any of the MDPI platforms:

MDPI's journal publishing website: www.mdpi.com
MDPI's conference hosting and management website: www.sciforum.net
MDPI's pre-print website : www.preprints.org
MDPI's knowledge sharing website : www.encyclopedia.pub
MDPI's books store: www.mdpi.com/books
MDPI's literature database : www.scilit.net

SciProfiles aims to serve scientific communities at large. It can be embedded into third-party websites and also welcomes integration of data from third-parties.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/2
Dr. Franck Vazquez: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/FranckVazquez
Dr. Martyn Rittman: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/martynrittman

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 MDPI Writing Prize. Entrants were asked to write on the theme "Judging research: How should research and researchers be evaluated and rewarded?" We received a large number of excellent essays from PhD students and postdocs, and the process of shortlisting and choosing winners was not an easy one. The winners demonstrated excellent writing skills alongside interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

As last year, we will begin the process of collating all entries into a book that will be available in open access format. Alongside promoting good writing skills, we see the prize as a way to promote the voices of early career researchers within broader debates and policy discussions.

Congratulations to all of the participants and especially the winners. The winners are:

1st Prize (500 CHF):
Albin Nilsson (National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland)
[Read here]

2nd Prize (250 CHF):
Qi Zhang (Shandong University, Jinan, China)
[Read here]
Igor Ogashawara (Indiana University, Indianapolis, US)
[Read here]

3rd Prize (100 CHF):
Margaret Sivapragasam (Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Perak, Malaysia)
[Read here]
Arvind Sharma (The University of Queensland, Gatton, Australia)
[Read here]
Jose Flores-Guerrero (University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands)
[Read here]

The MDPI Writing Prize is an annual award supported by MDPI Author Services, which provides services including language editing, reformatting, plagiarism checks, and image editing.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of a new functionality giving the possibility for researchers and scholars to endorse, and formally recommend articles to their colleagues.

MDPI was an early signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/read/) which calls for improvement in how quality and impact of scholarly research outputs are evaluated, especially in moving beyond journal-based citation metrics (journal Impact Factor, Scopus Citescore, etc.).

MDPI supports the establishment of article-level impact metrics, including citations, views, downloads, and Altmetric scores. These measures serve as an impact indicator for research articles on a case–by-case basis, assessing paper on its own merit. However, these metrics are also subjective and can give a biased picture of the article impact: they do not directly reflect the quality or the intrinsic scientific value of the article.

In our view, community engagement with publications based on community-driven metrics can help to overcome this limitation. We have therefore launched an option for scholars to endorse articles, indicating their own assessment of its content and making a recommendation to their community. This follows our implementation of the open source Hypothesis commenting tool, which has been available for all articles published by MDPI for over a year (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397). Both endorsement and commenting are available for all previously published and forthcoming MDPI articles.

In addition to potentially serving as a sustainable solution to article assessment, endorsements will help scientific communities to identify the most relevant articles, independently of the journal in which it was published.

The code for the endorsing functionality, which relies on DOIs and ORCIDs, will be made available on GitHub with an open source license.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, President and Founder
Dr. Franck Vazquez, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Martyn Rittman, Publishing Director

Encyclopedia is a free online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as provide a comprehensive record of scientific development. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to contact us via [email protected].

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.

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 welcome more universities from Poland, Italy, Germany, Brazil and other parts of the world to MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). A warm welcome to the institutions listed below, who have joined the Program in February and March this year.

Authors affiliated with these institutions can now enjoy a discount on the APC for papers accepted for publication in any MDPI journal. If you would like to learn more about our program, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap or email us at [email protected].

MDPI will be attending the 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2019), to be held in Paris, France, 7–12 July 2019.

ISIT is the premier international conference dedicated to the advancement of information theory and related areas. Each year, it brings together an international community of researchers and practitioners in the field of information theory to present and discuss new research results and perspectives on future developments relevant to all areas of information theory, including big data analytics, source and channel coding, communication theory and systems, cryptography and security, detection and estimation, emerging applications, networks, network coding/information theory, signal processing, and statistical/machine learning.

The following ten MDPI journals will be represented:

Entropy
Information
Future Internet
Algorithms
Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks
Computers
Big Data and Cognitive Computing
Axioms
Data
Cryptography

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our stand. 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://2019.ieee-isit.org/.

We are delighted to announce our participation in Jisc’s Publication Router project, as of March 2019.

Publications Router is a Jisc service that automatically sends notifications about research articles to institutions' systems such as their repositories or CRISs, since May 2015. Through this agreement, MDPI will provide Jisc with daily feeds and information regarding published articles, which will be gathered by their system and delivered to institutions also registered to this service. Nearly all of our articles are published within 15 days of acceptance, so institutions will receive them quite promptly.

The feed will include the full text of the published version of record, with no embargo, so the articles can be exposed immediately for public view. They are accompanied by rich metadata, including confirmation of the immediate CC BY licence, minimising the need for any manual intervention or checking.

For more information about Publications Router, you may contact Jisc’s central helpdesk at [email protected]. For any queries about MDPI’s institutional agreements and collaborations, you may get in touch with MDPI’s Institutional Engagement team at [email protected], which would be very happy to hear from further UK institutions.

Rigorous peer-review is the cornerstone of high quality academic publishing. Over 97,000 scholars served as reviewers for MDPI journals in 2018. We are extremely appreciative of all those who made a contribution to the editorial process in this capacity. At the beginning of every year, journal editorial offices publish a list all reviewers’ names to express our gratitude. In addition, this year the “MDPI Top Reviewer Awards” are announced, to recognize the very best reviewers for their expertise, dedication, high quality, and timely review reports. We are pleased to announce the following winners of the 2018 MDPI Top Reviewer Awards:

• Ali Behnood
• Andrea Pezzuolo
• Angela Gorgoglione
• Anna D'Auria
• Antonio D'Andrea
• Azhar Abbas
• Bogdan Zagajewski
• Chunhui Chen
• Dominika Głąbska
• Dominika Guzek
• Dragan Pamucar
• Francisco J. G. Silva
• Frank Li
• Gianluca Serafini
• Gyorgy Szekely
• Haozhi Pan
• Helvi Heinonen-Tanski
• José Manuel Gómez-Soberón
• Kathy Lewis
• Klara Kosova
• Luis N. López De Lacalle
• M. Z. Naser
• Malwina Tytła
• Masoume Amirkhani
• Matteo Ghidelli
• Moretti Laura
• Petra Schneider
• Roberto Cerchione
• Spyros Papaefthymiou
• Ştefan Cristian Gherghina

Since 2010, MDPI has run its own online submission system. More recently, we have made the software, with accompanying publishing services, available to other publishers as JAMS (Journal and Article Management System). We are now delighted to announce the launch of JAMS Journals, a standardized platform for operating open access journals at low cost.

JAMS Journals provides a comprehensive service, including a shared submission website, journal websites hosted at a URL provided by the publisher, and a full production service. There is a small setup fee and the cost for each published paper is just a few hundred Swiss francs.

The platform demonstrates that running an open access journal can be straightforward and affordable. The JAMS Journals platform is suitable for

• small publishers or groups of scholars looking to launch their own journal;
• existing publishers or societies seeking to explore open access options;
• publishers looking to convert an existing subscription journal to open access.

JAMS journals launches with two journals from Canadian-based publisher Etcetera Publications:

• Canadian Journal of Pesticides & Pest Management (http://www.cjppm.ca)
• Nanotechnology in Agriculture, Food & Environment (http://www.nanoafe.ca)

Dr AJ Al-Rajab (President of Etcetera Publications) comments:

“In the past few months, we were working on our project to launch new open access scientific journals in the field of agricultural and environmental sciences. We decided to go with JAMS for this venture because of the high quality of their services, reasonable prices, professionalism and easy communication. Our portfolio is expected to grow rapidly during 2019 to include more titles covering different areas in agriculture and environment. MDPI earned already our complete satisfaction and we are looking for a long term cooperation.”

Alongside the new platform, we continue to provide flexible, tailored journal management solutions for existing publishers. For any questions or to request a quotation, contact Dr. Constanze Schelhorn ([email protected]).

2018 was a great year for preprints, with increasing numbers of authors looking to make their papers available online before peer review. Along with other preprint servers, our platform Preprints.org  saw an increase in the uptake from authors, and more than double the number of announced papers compared to 2017. In fact, we recently passed two important milestones: 8000 preprints online and 30,000 authors. 

We believe that the whole research community has the opportunity to benefit from work being available online as early as possible. We thank and congratulate our authors for supporting us to make this goal a reality.

In 2019, we will be looking carefully at how to provide better value for authors, maintain efficiency while growing in size, and make sure we remain well-connected with the research community. 

If you want to participate, you can consider screening preprints or joining our advisory board. And, of course, posting your own 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 [email protected], FWF at [email protected], or the MDPI IOAP team at [email protected]

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/

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 [email protected] or the MDPI IOAP team at [email protected].

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 [email protected].

We are pleased to report Future Internet received a CiteScore of 1.25 for 2017. The metric reflects citation activity in 2017 in Scopus for papers published in the period 2014‒2016.

For the full details in the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile. To check the full list of MDPI journals receiving CiteScores, please see here.

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