Announcements

We are pleased to announce that the following Editorial Board and Topic Board members have been selected as the 2020 Highly Cited Chinese Researchers (released by Elsevier). We want to extend our sincerest congratulations to them. We also would like to acknowledge the professional support and valuable publications from our academic editors.

Here are the 2020 Highly Cited Chinese Researchers:

Prof. Dr. Aisheng Xiong, Nanjing Agricultural University;

Prof. Dr. Haijun Gong, Northwest A&F University;

Prof. Dr. Zhulong Chan, Huazhong Agricultural University;

Prof. Dr. Jihong Liu, Huazhong Agricultural University;

Prof. Dr. Kunsong Chen, Zhejiang University;

Prof. Dr. Xiaowu Wang, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences;

Prof. Dr. Shifeng Cao, Zhejiang Wanli University;

Prof. Dr. Qiangsheng Wu, Yangtze University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are pleased to announce the new Section “Viticulture” (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/horticulturae/sections/viticulture) in journal Horticulturae. Dr. Gianluca Allegro is serving as the Section Editor-in-Chief.

The Viticulture Section publishes a diverse range of original manuscripts related to the production of wine, as well as table and dried grapes, and aims to enhance the knowledge in this field. Publications will highlight advances in the cultivation of Vitis vinifera L., other Vitis spp., and hybrid grape cultivars, including issues related to breeding, grapevine physiology, berry ripening, vineyard management and strategies for adaptation to climate change. Specific topics for this Section may include precision viticulture and the mechanization of vineyard management.

Specifically, we welcome contributions by early career researchers. We also invite senior scientists to serve as Guest Editors of new Special Issues on a single and particular theme of significant and/or growing importance.

We are pleased to announce that Horticulturae will sponsor a Best Paper Award for the Olive, Citrus and Fruit Culture Network Conference of SECH (Congreso en red de Olivicultura, Citricultura y Fruticultura de la Sociedad Española de Ciencias Hortícolas). This conference will be held from 23 to 25 March 2021.

Conference Website: http://www.sech.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=22&Itemid=32

This is a public conference organized by the Olive and Fruit Growing and Citrus Working Group of the Association. The online form can provide opportunities for professionals, researchers and technicians from Spain and other European countries and other continents to participate.

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)

We are pleased to announce that Horticulturae became a monthly publication on 1 January, 2021. A monthly publication allows papers to be indexed in Web of Science and other indexing databases on a monthly basis rather than every 3 months, and they become searchable and are cited earlier. We also acknowledge the many valuable publications from our authors and the important contribution of our dedicated reviewers.

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.

The journal Horticulturae is launching a new position—Topic Editor. The main responsibilities of Topic Editors are as follows:

1. Promoting the journal at conferences (e.g. by incorporating one or two informative slides abouth the journal into your presentation, distributing flyers, recommending the journal as a publication venue to colleagues, etc.);
2. Promoting the journal on scholarly platforms (ResearchGate, Academia.edu), social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), or your personal website;
3. Providing support for themed Special Issues that fall into your expertise (when the Guest Editors are not available), including pre-checking of new submissions, making decisions, giving advice on scientific cases, etc.

Benefits

Topic Editors are encouraged to apply for travel grants for themselves and their research group after their 2-year tenure has been served. Topic Editors will be preferred as Editorial Board Members whenever we have vacancies.

If you are interested in this role or if you have any suggestions, please feel free to contact us (horticulturae@mdpi.com).