Announcements

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

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

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

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

* Journals given their first Impact Factor in 2021

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

To expand our offerings to the molecular science community, International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS) is recruiting researchers to join the Editorial Board of the following Sections:

The International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067; CODEN: IJMCFK; ISSN 1661-6596 for printed edition) provides an advanced forum for molecular studies in biology and chemistry, with a strong emphasis on molecular biology and molecular medicine. The 2020 impact factor for IJMS was 5.923. The website of IJMS can be accessed here.

Should you decide to serve on the Editorial Board, you would be responsible for some of the following tasks, depending on your availability:

• Making decisions on whether a manuscript should be accepted or not, based on the reports we collect;
• Suggesting special topics or editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research;
• Promoting IJMS and increasing its visibility at relevant academic conferences;
• Advising on the journal’s development.

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)

We are honored and pleased to announce that Professor Darren Griffin has been appointed Founding Editor-in-Chief for the new open access journal DNA. Darren Griffin is currently Professor of Genetics, School of Biosciences, University of Kent, UK.

Professor Darren Griffin received his Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Science degrees from the University of Manchester and his PhD from University College London. After postdoctoral stints at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Cambridge he landed his first academic post at Brunel University, before settling at the University of Kent, where he’s been for the last 15+ years. He is President of the International Chromosome and Genome Society, a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, the Royal Society of Biology and the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce. He is a prolific science communicator, making every effort to make scientific research publicly accessible and is an enthusiastic proponent for the benefits of interdisciplinary research endeavour.

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.

The acquisition of Current Issues in Molecular Biology in February 2021 is adding to the options MDPI’s authors have who wish to publish their research in molecular biology. The title was established at the turn of the last century, in 1999, and published some 390 articles and review papers on various aspects of molecular biology and microbiology spanning from basic mechanisms to applications in adjacent fields.

Current Issues in Molecular Biology (CIMB) is going to publish original research papers and reviews which provide fundamental mechanistic and functional insights into molecular biology, in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes. There will be three issues published in 2021, and four quarterly issues as of 2022. The journal’s scope is available here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/cimb/about.

CIMB is indexed within Scopus, SCIE (Web of Science) with Journal Impact Factor 2.695 (2019), PubMed and MEDLINE, among other databases. The journal’s CiteScore ranks in Q2 among journals listed in the “Microbiology, medical” category in Scopus.

Do not hesitate to contact the editorial office if you would like to get involved with the journal, by submitting a paper, or acting as a volunteer reviewer.

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)

During 2020, IJMS had many achievements. The impact factor of IJMS increased to 4.556 and the journal entered Q1 in the category “Biochemistry Molecular Biology” for the first time and ranked No.4 in Q2 in the category “Chemistry Multidisciplinary”. At the same time, IJMS achieved the top position for annual publications across journals in both categories, which, overall, published 9705 papers last year. Our Editorial Board is growing as well, now comprising of approximately 5000 experts in the research field of molecular sciences, offering valuable scientific advice and strong academic support.

High Altmetrics Papers  

• A Review of SARS-CoV-2 and the Ongoing Clinical Trials
  Yung-Fang Tu et al.
  Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2020, 21(7), 2657; doi: 10.3390/ijms21072657

• Lactoferrin as Protective Natural Barrier of Respiratory and Intestinal Mucosa against Coronavirus Infection and Inflammation
  Elena Campione et al.
  Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2020, 21(14), 4903; doi: 10.3390/ijms21144903

• Could Intravenous Immunoglobulin Collected from Recovered Coronavirus Patients Protect against COVID-19 and Strengthen the Immune System of New Patients?
  Samir Jawhara
  Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2020, 21(7), 2272; doi: 10.3390/ijms21072272

• Electrohypersensitivity as a Newly Identified and Characterized Neurologic Pathological Disorder: How to Diagnose, Treat, and Prevent It
  Dominique Belpomme et al.
  Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2020, 21(6), 1915; doi: 10.3390/ijms21061915

• RT-qPCR Testing of SARS-CoV-2: A Primer
  Stephen A. Bustin et al.
  Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2020, 21(8), 3004; doi: 10.3390/ijms21083004

Collection/Special Issue:

Recent Advances in T Cell Immunity
edited by Stephanie Gras

T cells are a key player in the adaptive immune system, and research in cellular immunology provides an understanding of T cell recognition, activation and dysregulation and their roles in infectious diseases, allergy, and cancer. A hallmark of T cells is their incredible diversity, achieved by their T cell receptor (TCR). Further diversity is seen in their target molecule, the Major Histocompatibility (MHC) complex. This diversity is critical as it facilitates the recognition of an almost infinite range of antigens that T cells will have to face over their lifetimes.

Top Downloaded Topics

• Neuroprotection: Rescue from Neuronal Death in the Brain
  edited by Bae Hwan Lee

• Peptides for Health Benefits 2020
  edited by Blanca Hernández-Ledesma

• Optimization of Biomaterials for Reconstructive and Regenerative Medicine
  edited by Ralf Smeets and Anders Henningsen

• Environmental Stress and Plants
  edited by Giampiero Cai, Luigi Parrotta and Lavinia Mareri

• Host–Pathogen Interaction 2.0
  edited by Andreas Burkovski

Open Calls

• Molecular Connection between the Endocrine System and Body Regulation
  edited by Barbara Predieri
  submission deadline 30 June 2021

• Research Progress in RNA-Binding Proteins
  edited by Alexandre Smirnov
  submission deadline 31 July 2021

• Cell Fate Decisions in Neural Development
  edited by Chaya Kalcheim
  submission deadline 31 August 2021

Read full list of call for papers at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijms/special_issues.

On behalf of the editorial team, we would like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief of IJMS, 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!

In 2021, IJMS will continue to contribute to academic exchange and sharing of knowledge.

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.