Announcements

The University of Basel and the MDPI Sustainability Foundation are organizing the First Basel Sustainable Publishing Forum on 9th September 2019.

The aim of this event is to provide background and perspectives on Plan S to Learned Societies, which have to make well-informed decisions to transition their journals to Open Access (OA).

The BSPF will bring together several representatives of Learned societies, Plan S architects as well as representatives from various publishers and publishing platforms. After getting the big picture from cOAlition S, panel discussions will allow to better understand the diverse challenges that Learned societies are facing to transition their journals to OA as well as to identify sustainable, implementable and scalable solutions for successful Open Access transition.

For program details and registration, please follow the link below:
https://sciforum.net/conference/SustainableSolutionsToOpenAccess

The European Wave and Tidal Energy Conference series are international, technical and scientific conferences, focused on ocean renewable energy. EWTEC series are widely respected for their commitment to maintaining high standards in the quality of academic and industrial contributions to their proceedings.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Journal of Marine Science and Engineering

Sustainability

Water

Energies

Applied Sciences

Electronics

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #13). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.ewtec.org/conferences/ewtec-2019/.

The editors are pleased to inform that the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering has received a first Impact Factor of 1.732, as published in the 2018 Edition of the Journal Citation Reports®, released just now. JMSE ranks 34th out of 66 (Q3) titles in the OCEANOGRAPHY' category.

Thank you to the authors, editorial board members and reviewers for their contribution in achieving this milestone for JMSE.

In addition to MDPI journals who received updated CiteScores for 2018, the titles listed below were added in Scopus recently and therefore received a first CiteScore in May 2019, based on last year's citation activity in the database.

For almost all of the newly added MDPI titles, their CiteScore ranks in the upper 50% of the distribution (Q1 or Q2) in at least one of the research areas. The following titles rank in the top 25% cited journals based on CiteScore: Actuators; Biomedicines; Coatings; Cosmetics; Fermentation; Journal of Fungi; Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity; Nanomaterials; and Publications.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

New CiteScore for MDPI Journals

Oceans is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal which is aiming to provide cutting-edge research related to all aspects of oceanography. We are now seeking a founding Editor-in-Chief to develop Oceans into a leading flagship journal in this field.

The main responsibilities of the Editor-in-Chief include the following:

• Setting the scope and direction of the journal
• Advising on the strategic development of the journal
• Ensuring the quality of the published content
• Coordinating the Editorial Board and stimulating their contributions to the journal
• Promoting the journal at scientific conferences and through other venues

A full application for evaluation should include these items:

• An up-to-date CV
• A description of the candidate’s vision for Oceans.

Applications are due by 9th July 2019. Please send your application or any questions to the Oceans Editorial Office (oceans@mdpi.com).

MDPI will be attending the 2019 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, to be held in Yokohama, Japan, 28 July – 2 August 2019.

This conference will be the 39th annual IGARSS symposium and will continue the excellent tradition of gathering world-class scientists, engineers and educators engaged in the fields of geoscience and remote sensing. We believe that the additional scientific themes of this event, focusing on 'Disasters and Environment' will allow the formation of an inspiring technical program.

IGARSS is recognized today as a premier event in remote sensing and provides an ideal forum for obtaining up-to-date information about the latest developments, exchanging ideas, identifying future trends in your research area and making contacts with the international remote sensing community. With intensive and careful planning underway we anticipate a technically outstanding and most pleasant symposium.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Remote Sensing
IJGI
Sensors
Water
Geosciences
Atmosphere
Land
Forests
JMSE
Sustainability

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth # 30). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit https://igarss2019.org/CallForSponsorsExhibitors.asp.

We are pleased to welcome more universities from Poland, Italy, Germany, Brazil and other parts of the world to MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). A warm welcome to the institutions listed below, who have joined the Program in February and March this year.

Authors affiliated with these institutions can now enjoy a discount on the APC for papers accepted for publication in any MDPI journal. If you would like to learn more about our program, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap or email us at ioap@mdpi.com.

We are delighted to announce our participation in Jisc’s Publication Router project, as of March 2019.

Publications Router is a Jisc service that automatically sends notifications about research articles to institutions' systems such as their repositories or CRISs, since May 2015. Through this agreement, MDPI will provide Jisc with daily feeds and information regarding published articles, which will be gathered by their system and delivered to institutions also registered to this service. Nearly all of our articles are published within 15 days of acceptance, so institutions will receive them quite promptly.

The feed will include the full text of the published version of record, with no embargo, so the articles can be exposed immediately for public view. They are accompanied by rich metadata, including confirmation of the immediate CC BY licence, minimising the need for any manual intervention or checking.

For more information about Publications Router, you may contact Jisc’s central helpdesk at help@jisc.ac.uk. For any queries about MDPI’s institutional agreements and collaborations, you may get in touch with MDPI’s Institutional Engagement team at ioap@mdpi.com, which would be very happy to hear from further UK institutions.

Rigorous peer-review is the cornerstone of high quality academic publishing. Over 97,000 scholars served as reviewers for MDPI journals in 2018. 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 all reviewers’ names to express our gratitude. In addition, this year the “MDPI Top Reviewer Awards” are announced, to recognize the very best reviewers for their expertise, dedication, high quality, and timely review reports. We are pleased to announce the following winners of the 2018 MDPI Top Reviewer Awards:

• Ali Behnood
• Andrea Pezzuolo
• Angela Gorgoglione
• Anna D'Auria
• Antonio D'Andrea
• Azhar Abbas
• Bogdan Zagajewski
• Chunhui Chen
• Dominika Głąbska
• Dominika Guzek
• Dragan Pamucar
• Francisco J. G. Silva
• Frank Li
• Gianluca Serafini
• Gyorgy Szekely
• Haozhi Pan
• Helvi Heinonen-Tanski
• José Manuel Gómez-Soberón
• Kathy Lewis
• Klara Kosova
• Luis N. López De Lacalle
• M. Z. Naser
• Malwina Tytła
• Masoume Amirkhani
• Matteo Ghidelli
• Moretti Laura
• Petra Schneider
• Roberto Cerchione
• Spyros Papaefthymiou
• Ştefan Cristian Gherghina

Since 2010, MDPI has run its own online submission system. More recently, we have made the software, with accompanying publishing services, available to other publishers as JAMS (Journal and Article Management System). We are now delighted to announce the launch of JAMS Journals, a standardized platform for operating open access journals at low cost.

JAMS Journals provides a comprehensive service, including a shared submission website, journal websites hosted at a URL provided by the publisher, and a full production service. There is a small setup fee and the cost for each published paper is just a few hundred Swiss francs.

The platform demonstrates that running an open access journal can be straightforward and affordable. The JAMS Journals platform is suitable for

• small publishers or groups of scholars looking to launch their own journal;
• existing publishers or societies seeking to explore open access options;
• publishers looking to convert an existing subscription journal to open access.

JAMS journals launches with two journals from Canadian-based publisher Etcetera Publications:

• Canadian Journal of Pesticides & Pest Management (http://www.cjppm.ca)
• Nanotechnology in Agriculture, Food & Environment (http://www.nanoafe.ca)

Dr AJ Al-Rajab (President of Etcetera Publications) comments:

“In the past few months, we were working on our project to launch new open access scientific journals in the field of agricultural and environmental sciences. We decided to go with JAMS for this venture because of the high quality of their services, reasonable prices, professionalism and easy communication. Our portfolio is expected to grow rapidly during 2019 to include more titles covering different areas in agriculture and environment. MDPI earned already our complete satisfaction and we are looking for a long term cooperation.”

Alongside the new platform, we continue to provide flexible, tailored journal management solutions for existing publishers. For any questions or to request a quotation, contact Dr. Constanze Schelhorn (constanze.schelhorn@mdpi.com).