Announcements

Information (ISSN: 2078-2489) continued its development throughout 2021 and it has seen a continuous increase in its CiteScore over the past five years. Moreover, it received a CiteScore (2020) of 3.0, combined with a steadily increasing submission rate, with 1581 new submissions in 2021. The team behind the journal is trying their best to improve the visibility and reputation of Information in the field of information science and technology, data, knowledge and communication.

In 2021, we received 1581 new submissions and published 524 papers. The median processing time (from submission to publication online) was 38 days in 2021. A total of 9 new Editorial Board Members (EBMs) joined the journal, and the number of Editorial Board Members increased to 169. Furthermore, we now have 1305 subscribers in total.

Information also held the 1st International Online Conference on Information (IECI 2021) (https://sciforum.net/event/IECI2021). We invited the Associate Editor to be the General Chair and 34 EBMs to make up the committee. There were eight speakers in total, including EBMs and other excellent scholars, and we also set up a “Best Poster Award”. We published 14 conference papers. We appreciate all the support and help from our chairs, conference committee, and speakers. The journal will continue to attract more and more authors from all over the world who appreciate its very efficient peer review and publishing processes.

Highly Cited Papers:

• “Twitter Sentiment Analysis towards COVID-19 Vaccines in the Philippines Using NaïveBayes”
  by Charlyn Villavicencio, Julio Jerison Macrohon, X. Alphonse Inbaraj, et al.
• “An Explainable Fake News Detector Based on Named Entity Recognition and Stance Classification Applied to COVID-19”
  by Giorgio De Magistris, Samuele Russo,and Paolo Roma et al.
• “Impulse Buying Behaviors in Live Streaming Commerce Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response Framework”
  by Chao-Hsing Lee and Chien-Wen Chen
• “A Comprehensive Survey of Knowledge Graph-Based Recommender Systems: Technologies, Development, and Contributions”
  by Janneth Chicaiza and Priscila Valdiviezo-Diaz
• “An Empirical Study on the Impact of E-Commerce Live Features on Consumers’ Purchase Intention: From the Perspective of Flow Experience and Social Presence”
  by Haijian Wang, Jianyi Ding, and Umair Akram et al.

Collections/Special Issues:

Information 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 that are published in a Special Issue are collected on a dedicated page of the journal’s website.

Hot Special Issues:

• “Knowledge Graphs for Search and Recommendation”;
• “Pervasive Computing in IoT”;
• “Novel Methods and Applications in Natural Language Processing”;
• “Knowledge Management, Digital Trust, and Corporate Social Responsibility in the Era of Social Media”;
• “Recent Advances in IoT and Cyber/Physical Security”;
• “Advances in AI for Health and Medical Applications”;
• “Natural Language Processing and Applications: Challenges and Perspectives”;
• “Secure and Trustworthy Cyber–Physical Systems”;
• “Evaluating Methods and Decision Making”.

Open Calls:

• Topical Collection “Augmented Reality Technologies, Systems and Applications”
  edited by Dr. Ramon Fabregat, Dr. Jorge Bacca-Acosta, and Dr. N.D. Duque-Mendez
• Topical Collection “Pervasive Intelligent Data Systems”
  edited by Prof. Dr. Filipe Portela, Prof. Dr. Manuel Filipe Santos, and Dr. Kolomvatsos Kostas
• Special Issue “Machine Learning Applications and Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development”
  edited by Dr. Rahul Reddy Nadikattu, Dr. Roman Tsarev, and Dr. Pawan Whig
• Special Issue “Wireless Edge Computing: Enabling Technologies for the Next Generation of Cloud Computing”
  edited by Dr. Diogo Mattos, and Dr. Dianne Medeiros
• Special Issue “Advances in Algorithmic Game Theory and Multi-Agent Systems”
  edited by Dr. Jie Zhang
• Special Issue “Data Science in Health Services”
  edited by Dr. Philippe J. Giabbanelli, Dr. Jennifer M. Badham, and Dr. Teresa B. Gibson

See the full list of Special Issues at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/special_issues.

On behalf of the editorial team, we would like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief of Information, all Section Editors-in-Chief and Editorial Board Members, as well as the Guest Editors of Special Issues, 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.

In 2022, Information will continue to contribute to academic exchange and the sharing of knowledge.

“Challenges and Trends of Financial Technology (Fintech): A Systematic Literature Review”
Ryan Randy Suryono et al.
Information 2020, 11(12), 590; 10.3390/info11120590

“Examining the Effects of Media-Generated Stereotypes on Receivers’ Trust and Attitude in Pakistan. Moderating Influence of Ethnicity and Gender”
Syed Hassan Raza et al.
Information 2021, 12(1), 35; 10.3390/info12010035

“Social Media Goes Green—The Impact of Social Media on Green Cosmetics Purchase Motivation and Intention”
Rebeka-Anna Pop et al.
Information 2020, 11(9), 447; 10.3390/info11090447

“COVID-19 Public Sentiment Insights and Machine Learning for Tweets Classification”
Jim Samuel et al.
Information 2020, 11(6), 314; 10.3390/info11060314

“Employee Well-Being and Digital Work during the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Marta Juchnowicz et al.
Information 2021, 12(8), 293; 10.3390/info12080293

“Culture and Society in the Digital Age”
Ilya Levin et al.
Information 2021, 12(2), 68; 10.3390/info12020068

“Impulse Buying Behaviors in Live Streaming Commerce Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response Framework”
Chao-Hsing Lee et al.
Information 2021, 12(6), 241; 10.3390/info12060241

“Industry 4.0 Readiness Models: A Systematic Literature Review of Model Dimensions”
Mohd Hizam-Hanafiah et al.
Information 2020, 11(7), 364; 10.3390/info11070364

“Aspects Regarding Safety and Security in Hotels: Romanian Experience”
Alexandru Anichiti et al.
Information 2021, 12(1), 44; 10.3390/info12010044

“Internet of Things: A General Overview between Architectures, Protocols and Applications“
Marco Lombardi et al.
Information 2021, 12(2), 87; 10.3390/info12020087

Information (ISSN: 2078-2489) is currently recruiting Section Editors-in-Chief to head the following Sections: “Information Theory and Methodology”, “Information Processes” and “Information Systems”. If you are interested in applying for this role in one of these Sections, please contact the Information Editorial Office (information@mdpi.com).

We are pleased to announce that the following 15 Editorial Board Members have recently joined Information (ISSN 2078-2489).

Name: Prof. Dr. Ge Yu
Affiliation: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110169, China
Interests: database theory and technology; distributed and parallel systems; big data and cloud computing; blockchain and applications

Name: Prof. Dr. Sabina Rossi
Affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
Interests: formal methods; programming language semantics; concurrency theory; performance evaluation

Name: Prof. Dr. Peter Revesz
Affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA
Interests: databases; computational linguistics; bioinformatics; geoinformatics

Name: Prof. Dr. Wenhai Chih
Affiliation: Department of Business Administration, Management School, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien City, Taiwan
Interests: information applications

Name: Prof. Dr. Domenico Fabio Savo
Affiliation: Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
Interests: knowledge representation; description logics; ontologies; semantic web

Name: Dr. Luca Bedogni
Affiliation: Department of Physics, Informatics and Mathematics, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, 41121 Modena, MO, Italy
Interests: context-aware computing; vehicular networks; privacy; IoT

Name: Prof. Dr. Dharmaraj Veeramani
Affiliation: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA
Interests: industrial data analytics and AI-enabled intelligent decision systems; business process improvement and automation; Internet of Things (IoT); smart and connected enterprises

Name: Prof. Dr. Luigi Laura
Affiliation: Faculty of Engineering, Uninettuno University, 00186 Roma, Italy
Interests: algorithms; artificial intelligence; IoT; edge computing

Name: Prof. Dr. Marcin Paprzycki
Affiliation: Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Interests: intelligent systems; software agents and agent systems; semantic technologies; high performance computing; data analytics

Name: Dr. Tieling Zhang
Affiliation: Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia
Interests: statistical data modelling; big data analytics; Bayesian inference; Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation; machine learning; decision support systems; system reliability modeling; degradation modeling and condition prediction; optimization

Name: Prof. Dr. Libing Wu
Affiliation: School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Interests: computer network; Internet of Things; information and cybersecurity; machine learning

Name: Prof. Dr. Kun She
Affiliation: School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
Interests: AI; blockchain

Name: Dr. Francesco Fontanella
Affiliation: Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, 03043 Cassino, FR, Italy
Interests: evolutionary computation; machine learning; feature selection; pattern recognition; bayesian networks; cultural heritage

Name: Dr. Atif Ali Khan
Affiliation: Department of Medicine, Section of Computational Biomedicine and Biomedical Data Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Interests: computational biology; clinical data science; biomedical and health informatics; applied artificial intelligence; data mining; epidemiology

Name: Prof. Dr. Rui Zhang
Affiliation: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China
Interests: information security and privacy

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

Further details about the Information Editorial Board can be found at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/editors.

Information (ISSN 2078-2489) is an international, scientific, open access journal containing research pertaining to information science and technology, data, knowledge, and communication. In order to develop different research areas and attract an increased number of high-quality papers, we are pleased to announce the addition of the following four new sections in Information:

• “Internet of Things (IoT)” (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/sections/internet_of_things)
• “Wireless Technologies" (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/sections/wireless_technologies)
• “Biomedical Information and Health” (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/sections/biomedical_information_health)

We are now recruiting Editorial Board Members (EBMs) for these sections. If you are an active researcher in one of the aforementioned fields and are passionate about publishing cutting-edge research, please do not hesitate to contact us (information@mdpi.com). Alternatively, you may wish to submit your work directly via the following link: https://susy.mdpi.com/user/manuscripts/upload/?journal=Information.

We are pleased to announce that the following 3 Editorial Board Members have recently joined Information (ISSN 2078-2489).

Name: Dr. Katsuhide Fujita

Affiliation: Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Tokyo 184-8588, Japan
Interests: multi-agent system; natural language processing; data mining; artificial intelligence

Name: Dr. Sandro Bimonte

Affiliation: TSCF, INRAE, 63178 Aubière, France
Interests: data warehouse; OLAP; UML; business intelligence; geovisualization; IoT

Name: Dr. Lin Chen

Affiliation: School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
Interests: distributed algorithms; computer networks; wireless networks

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

Further details about the Information Editorial Board can be found at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/editors.

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.

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.

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.