Announcements

Name: Prof. Dr. Alberto Signore, MD, PhD.
Affiliation: Department of Surgical-Medical Sciences and Translational Medicine, University of Rome “Sapienza”, Rome, Italy
Interests: nuclear medicine; infection imaging; inflammation imaging; thyroid cancer imaging; pre-clinical imaging; imaging immuno-therapy; imaging autoimmune diseases; PET imaging in hematological disorders.

1. Can you talk a bit about your current research in radiolabeled blood elements, and what brings you to Hemato?

The first paper on radiolabeled blood cells appeared in the late 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, the topic became extremely popular, with excellent publications in major journals mainly by nuclear medicine physicians. With the new century, many clinicians (mainly hematologists, specialists in infective diseases, orthopedic surgeons, vascular surgeons, diabetologists, rheumatologists, and gastroenterologists) became interested in this technique and conducted several clinical trials. However, the technique was not standardized all over the world and, often, results were not reproducible in different centers. Therefore, in the last 15 years, while I was coordinator of the Committee for imaging Infections of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM), I started a huge program in three main phases.

Phase 1 included the standardization of the technique for labeling white blood cells and image acquisition and interpretation. This was accomplished with the agreement of several specialists in the field and the publication of two major guidelines.

Phase 2 included establishing a scientific partnership with several other European societies for the preparation of clinical guidelines on a diagnostic flowchart for diagnosis and follow-up of several infective/inflammatory diseases. To this end, we established cooperation with the European Bone & Joint Infection Society (EBJIS), the European Society of Radiology (ESR), the European Society of Neuroradiology (ESNR), the European Society of Clinical Microbiology ad Infective Diseases (ESCMID), the European Crohn's and Colitis Organization (ECCO), the European Society of Gastrointestinal Radiology (ESGAR), the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology (EULAR), the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), the European Society of Vascular Surgery (ESVS), the World Association against Infection of Orthopaedics and Trauma (WAIOT) and with the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Several clinical guidelines have been published or are about to be published.

In phase 3 of the program, we aimed to divulge the use and clinical utility of these nuclear medicine techniques amongst clinicians of different specialties around the world utilizing publications, courses, congresses, and clinical collaboration for large multi-center clinical studies. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has delayed this last phase, but having a journal dedicated to publishing these studies could be an important tool to reach this goal. Every month, there are 10 to 20 papers published in several journals on this topic and I hope to recruit all major papers in this new section of Hemato.

2. What developments are occurring in your field of expertise that excite you at this time?

Blood cells, including granulocytes, erythrocytes, plates, lymphocytes, monocytes, and dendritic cells, can be labeled using several different approaches and using several different tracers.

Two major approaches are ex vivo or in vivo cell labeling. In the first case, cells are isolated from the patient, labeled in vitro in sterile conditions, and re-administered to the patient. The second approach requires the use of a specific radiolabeled probe (usually a monoclonal antibody or its fragment) that is injected into the patient and binds in vivo to the target cell population. Both approaches have pros and cons.

As far as the tracer is concerned, we could label cells or probes with a fluorescent dye (low penetrance in tissues, poor human use) or with a radioactive isotope. Due to the high radiosensitivity of cells, the choice of isotopes is modest and, to date, mainly limited to 111-Indium and 99m-Technetium. Both isotopes have pros and cons, the most relevant negative aspect being their detection by a gamma camera with low image resolution (approx. 6-8 mm).

Therefore, research is always looking at new antibodies or peptides to label, to increase specificity and reduce toxicity, but also looking at new isotopes, particularly for PET/CT imaging with high resolution (3-4 mm). In addition, new cell types become interesting to follow in vivo, such as PD1+ cells or NK cells in oncology, or dendritic and stamina cells in hematology, etc.

3. What are the qualities that you look for in an article, and what would attract authors to want to publish in Hemato?

Novelty and clinical impact of the main message. The topic of radiolabeled blood cells is in between Nuclear Medicine, Hematology, Infection, Orthopedics and other minor specialties. All papers in this field are welcome.

Of course, Hemato is also looking for all papers in which Nuclear Medicine (both gamma-camera and PET studies) is involved in hematological disorders using commercially available radiopharmaceuticals, fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) at first.

4. Do you have any valuable suggestions you would like to share with young researchers/editorial editors?

Although the topic of radiolabeled cells is very interesting, I would suggest to start recruiting papers on the use of PET/CT in hematological diseases and stimulate all young doctors/researchers to submit clinical studies. This will allow us to rapidly get a good Impact Factor and be mentioned in Scopus and PubMed. Once this is done, more research papers will be submitted and particularly on the topic of radiolabeled blood cells.

Name: Prof. Dr. Antonino Carbone
Affiliation: Professor of Pathology, Former Chairman of Department of Pathology, Centro di Riferimento Oncologico (CRO) Aviano, National Cancer Institute, Aviano, Italy
Interests: hematopathology; Hodgkin lymphoma; non-Hodgkin lymphoma; HIV-associated lymphoma; virus-associated lymphoma; post-transplant lymphoma; pathology; immunohistochemistry; tumor microenvironment; telepathology

Part I—Regarding the journal Hemato:

1. What appealed to you about the journal Hemato that made you want to take the role as its Editor-in-Chief?

Two things mainly appealed to me about the journal Hemato.

The first was that, being a new journal independent of scientific societies associated with single disciplines, there was an occasion of building an editorial board consisting of scientifically recognized researchers and professionals belonging to different disciplines, but with converging scientific and research interests in hematology.

The second is to have the possibility of choosing new scientific and editorial strategies with the help of an Assistant Manager, the precious Carey Yuan, who keeps in contact with the economic and administrative staff that is under the responsibility of the publisher.

2. In your work as the Editor-in-Chief, what do you find especially rewarding?

I find the interest that the journal has sparked among hematological researchers and readers in just a short period of time especially gratifying. I am very grateful to the authors who have submitted their brilliant works over the past year, in spite of the pandemic.

I greatly admire the relationship of mutual trust and esteem between the members of the Editorial Board. With the members of the Editorial Board, we have built a section of the journal dedicated to the critical review of the most stimulating works published by top international journals. With the Section Editors, who manage sections of the journal according to different topics of the hematological discipline, we have created special honorary issues concerning the outstanding protagonists of international hematological research. This initiative has been a source of great emotion.

3. What do you think of the future of Hemato? What do you expect from this journal? What perspective do you think the journal will bring to the related fields?

Hemato is, and will increasingly be, a journal that welcomes and stimulates interdisciplinarity in research and treatment in hematology. I think the future of Hemato is closely linked to the development of translational studies that will involve immunology, blood cancers, coagulation and inflammation. In accordance with this evolution of knowledge, I think that the journal will play a role in transferring knowledge to the immunotherapy, both in oncology and in internal medicine. The journal could have particular relevance not only to specialists and researchers, but also medical students and practitioners.

Part II—Regarding the main fields of interest:

1. Can you share your career development story briefly? For example, what cases have influenced you the most?

The starting point of my scientific career was a strong interest in oncological diseases. In this context, I was particularly impressed by the diseases of uncertain nature and in diseases at the borderline between inflammation and cancer. To me, Hodgkin lymphoma represented a unique model of this condition. I studied this disease using all the technologies available in histopathology that have occurred over time. These methodologies, among which I mention classical morphology, immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization and molecular biology, have in turn represented and still represent my research tools. I have given particular attention to their development to optimize their routine application in research and in patient management.

2. As a researcher in hematopathology and lymphoma, what are the latest developments in your field？

The latest developments in my field of interest concern the identification of histopathological and/or genetic disease variants that may be correlated with refractoriness to conventional therapy (for example, refractory or relapsed Hodgkin lymphoma) or with a particularly aggressive evolution in the affected patient (for example, transformed follicular lymphoma). Conventional immunohistochemistry may be coupled with immunofluorescence or multiplexing immunohistochemistry to recognize these variants.

As far as oncogenic viruses and hematological tumors are concerned, much knowledge has been determined by the HIV epidemic, which has represented an intense and continuous field of interest to me. The identification of several hematological diseases linked to HIV, EBV and KSHV has impacted the classification of lymphomas and the treatment of these patients. Today, the management and treatment of these patients are the same as those of patients with non-virus-related diseases.

3. Do you have any valuable suggestions that you would like to share with young researchers?

As with the athletes who participated in the Olympics, young researchers must have enthusiasm, pay attention at school, look up to the seniors and study continuously. I suggest that young researchers choose a skilled scientist to learn from, at a well reputed institution that offers extensive experience in a research field of broad interest and health impact.

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

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

Contact: Setsuko Nishihara, MDPI Tokyo

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

Selections

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

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

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

Special Issue Reprints

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

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

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

Why choose MDPI Books?

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

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

Contact: Laura Wagner, MDPI Books Manager (email)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

In November 2020, the Spanish Society of Hematology and Hemotherapy (SEHH) became affiliated with Hemato, JCM and Cells. As part of this collaboration, all members of the SEHH enjoy a discount on the article processing charge (APC) when submitting articles to the journals.

The SEHH is a scientific society purposed with the promotion, development and dissemination of research advances in two specialist areas, Hematology and Hemotherapy. In particular, the SEHH focuses on their medical, scientific, organizational, care, teaching and research aspects. Hematology, as a specialty, covers all aspects related to the physiology of the blood and hematopoietic organs, the diagnosis and treatment of benign and malignant diseases of the blood, the study of the hemostasis and coagulation system, and all aspects related to transfusion medicine, including hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. The professional role of the hematologist covers all aspects of the practice.

With 61 years of history, the SEHH is today an organization that contributes significantly to science. At present, it holds a community of almost 2800 professionals, of which many are internationally recognized figures, who continually contribute to making hematology, globally, one of the most prestigious fields of Spanish medicine. The society considers that, in order to achieve optimal patient care, it is essential to have access to medical advances, promote research and have well-trained and highly qualified specialists in the management of hematological diseases.

The SEHH is a professional organization whose functions and research are highly relevant to the scope of Hemato, JCM and Cells. We look forward to collaborating with the SEHH and to publishing state-of-the-art research from its members.

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.