Announcements

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
liliane.auwerter@mdpi.com

We are pleased to announce that JCM (ISSN: 2077-0383) has established a new collaboration with the European Independent Foundation in Angiology/Vascular Medicine (VAS). It is a non-profit scientific organization that has been working on vascular diseases and their prevention for 30 years. Members can enjoy discounts for their submissions.

Other affiliated societies of JCM can be found at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jcm/societies.

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

In July 2021, the Japan Association for Clinical Engineers (JACE) became affiliated with JCM, As part of this collaboration, all members of the JACE enjoy a discount on the article processing charge (APC) when submitting articles to the journal.

JACE was founded as a voluntary organization in February 1990. It has, through its role as an association for professionals specializing in the operation, maintenance, and inspection of life-support systems directly linked to human life, strived constantly to create a system in which patients can receive highly advanced engineering-based medical care safely with the effective use of limited medical resources. In a bid to accomplish its ocial mission, expand the duties, and raise the status of clinical engineers, it was approved as a public-interest corporation by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (MHLW) on March 14, 2002.

The objective of this association is to contribute to the promotion and development of the nation’s medical care and welfare through the raising of professional ethics of clinical engineers, enhancement of their professional knowledge and skills, and improvement of reliability of equipment-based medical care and welfare, including life-support systems.

To aim at the global standard, JACE established “World Association for Clinical Engineers” or WACE (tentative name) and organized its first convention in Japan. For more information, please see: https://www.ja-ces.or.jp/.

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)

We are pleased to announce that, up to now, 116 distinguished scholars have joined the JCM Editorial Board in this quarter, including the well-known Prof. Dr. Aldo Pietro Maggioni from the ANMCO Research Center of the Heart Care Foundation, Prof. Dr. Paolo P. Prandoni from the "Arianna Anticoagulazione" Foundation, Dr. Stefan Evers from the University of Münster, Prof. Dr. Ben Willem Mol from Monash University, Prof. Dr. Tobias Welte from Medizinische Hochaschule Hannover, Prof. Dr. Fabiola Atzeni from the University of Messina, Prof. Dr. Gianluca Aimaretti from Università del Piemonte Orientale, Prof. Dr. Eva Compérat from L’Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris and various other prominent academics. 

You can access more information on our new members on the website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jcm/editors. 

Their trust in JCM is much appreciated, and we look forward to their contributions to the journal.

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)

We are pleased to announce that the first International Electronic Conference on Clinical Medicine (ECCM), chaired by Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Andrès, from the University Hospital of Strasbourg, France, and Prof. Dr. Michael G. Hennerici, from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, will be held on 15–30 September 2021 at Sciforum (https://sciforum.net/conference/ECCM).

The conference will cover all the multidisciplinary aspects of clinical medicine. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Cardiology

COVID-19

Gastroenterology and Hepatopancreatobiliary Medicine

Oncology

Infectious Diseases

Pulmonology

Hematology

Neurology and Stroke Neurology

Stomatology

Clinical Psychology

Psychiatry

Obstetrics and Gynecology

Endocrinology and Metabolism

Nephrology and Urology

Epidemiology and Public Health

Orthopedics

Dermatology

Ophthalmology

Otolaryngology

Nuclear Medicine and Radiology

Pharmacology

Anesthesiology

Emergency Medicine

The conference will be completely free of charge, both to attend and, for scholars, to upload and present their latest work on the conference platform. Accepted abstract submissions will be published in the proceedings of the conference, and authors are invited to develop their abstracts into full manuscripts, which will be considered for publication in JCM, with a 10% discount on the APC. JCM is an open access journal, published semimonthly by MDPI, in the field of clinical medicine. The journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE IF = 3.303) and other databases. Full texts are archived in PubMed Central (PMC).

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission: 31 May 2021
• Acceptance Notification: 14 June 2021
• Full Paper Submission: 12 July 2021
• Conference Open: 15–30 September 2021

For more information on ECCM, please visit the conference website (https://sciforum.net/conference/ECCM) or contact us by email (eccm-2021@mdpi.com).