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)

We are excited to welcome the following recognized researchers who recently joined the Editorial Board of JTAER.

Prof. Dr. Ja-Shen Chen, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan;
Prof. Dr. Alessandro De Nisco, University of International Studies of Rome (UNINT), Italy;
Prof. Dr. Ravi Chinta, Nova Southeastern University, USA;
Dr. Carlos Orús, University of Zaragoza, Spain;
Prof. Dr. Ercan Oztemel, Marmara University, Turkey;
Prof. Dr. Riadh Ladhari, Laval University, Canada;
Dr. José Ramón Saura, Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain;
Dr. Xuefeng Zhang, Anhui Polytechnic University, China;
Dr. Shahrokh Niko, Åbo Akademi University & Stockholm University, Finland.

On the occasion of our newly launched topical collection “The Connected Consumer” we would like to share with you the scholars behind it and a summary of the key aspects of connected consumers. This post will consist of an introduction to the topic and two investigator spotlights, one dedicated to Prof. Dr Rodríguez-Ardura and the second to Dr Ammetller. 

What is a "connected consumer"?

A connected consumer is a person who buys online, who consumes digital content or products, who interacts with friends and acquaintances through social media and who makes purchase decisions with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

How do connected consumers have transformed e-commerce businesses?

Connected consumers embrace innovative products and process large amounts of marketing information but pay less attention to detail than ever before. They expect to receive instant gratification for their actions and requests on e-commerce platforms and quickly become bored or distracted. They particularly trust other connected consumers’ opinions, even if they do not know them personally, and contribute to brands' virtual communities just for fun, to feel part of a group or to help others. Despite being overstimulated by digital marketing communications, they tend to appreciate the ones with highly emotional or sensorial elements more. In e-commerce, brands should offer compelling and immersive experiences, which at the same time make consumers feel empowered in their relationships with brands.

Will this new trend in consumer behaviour change the e-commerce and commerce landscape in general?

Through their attitudes, preferences and behaviour, connected consumers are not only changing the face of e-commerce but also brick and mortar stores. Physical stores need to digitize and reimagine. They should add e-commerce services, and fully integrate e-commerce with the traditional channels so as to offer true seamless, omnichannel experiences. Because the connected consumer’s behaviour is non-linear but fragmented across channels, retailers should work hard to convert clients in each and every step of the consumer journey; so they must push the conversion rate of physical store browsing to purchasing on the e-commerce platform. Also, visits to physical stores should be so appealing and engaging that no connected consumer wants to miss out.

Investigator Spotlight I: Prof. Dr Inma Rodríguez-Ardura

Dr Inma Rodríguez-Ardura is a Professor of Marketing at the Open University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya or UOC) and is also the director of the UOC’s Digital Business Research Group (or DigiBiz), which is officially accredited as a Consolidated Research Group. She has been a Visiting Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, a Visiting Professor at Babson College, Boston, and a Resident Researcher at the UOC’s Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. Furthermore, she has served as a faculty member at the University of Barcelona and as a part-time Lecturer at the University of Miami Herbert Business School; and has taught master’s courses and seminars at a number of other universities. At the UOC, Prof. Rodríguez-Ardura has coordinated the Marketing Area of the Faculty of Economics and Business and created and has been Director of the Master's Programme in Marketing Management, and the Bachelor's Degree Programme in Marketing and Market Research. Moreover, she has served as Director of the University Master's Programme, and the Doctoral Programme in the Information and Knowledge Society. Her work designing and developing courses in marketing has led her to coordinate and author over thirty didactic materials. 

Prof. Rodríguez-Ardura has carried out twenty-seven research projects funded by European and international institutions. Her research has appeared in numerous impact journals. In addition, she has authored scores of research books and textbooks and has guest-edited special issues on social e-commerce (International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing), qualitative methods for digital marketing (Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research), and consumer behaviour in digital markets (Sustainability). She is currently Section Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research and Associate Editor of Behaviour & Information Technology.

Educational background

• PhD in Economics and Business from the University of Barcelona

Research interests

Prof. Rodríguez-Ardura’s research interests are in the areas of digital marketing channels and e-retailing, the connected consumer (immersive) experiences, and marketing for e-learning.

Personal Interests

• Travelling
• Sports

Investigator Spotlight II: Dr Gisela Ammetller

Dr Ammetller is an Associate Professor of Marketing within the Economics and Business Department of the Open University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, UOC), where she is in charge of marketing courses. She has created several didactic materials for this University, has been the Academic Coordinator (2006-2008) and the Director (2008-2011; 2014-2015) of the Master’s Degree Programme in Marketing and Communication Management. She also collaborates as a lecturer in Postgraduate and Master courses of other universities. She is a researcher of the Digital Business Research Group (DigiBiz) within the UOC, which is accredited as a Consolidate Research Group by the Catalan Government in Spain.

Educational background

• Bachelor in Business Administration from the University of Barcelona
• Bachelor in Marketing and Market Research from the University of Barcelona
• M.Sc. Information and Knowledge Society from the UOC
• PhD in Information and Knowledge Society from the UOC

Research interests

Dr Ammetller’s research focuses on digital marketing and consumer behaviour, entrepreneurship and the interface between marketing and e-learning. Within these fields of knowledge, she has co-authored books, book chapters and scientific articles, and she has also participated in related research projects.

Personal Interests

• Photography
• Rock music
• Travelling

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 Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (JTAER) will be published by MDPI from Volume 16, Issue 3 (2021). If you are interested in contributing to our journal and would like to acquire further credentials in the field of electronic commerce by serving on the JTAER team, please do not hesitate to get in touch about joining the Editorial Board. We are seeking team members from diverse backgrounds, such as Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, Law, and the Social Science, among others.

If you are interested in this position or know of potential candidates to recommend, please contact us by 30 June 2021.

JTAER (ISSN 0718-1876) is fully open access with a distinguished Editorial Board representing extensive academic expertise (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jtaer/editors). JTAER is covered by the Social Science Citation Index (Web of Science). The Impact Factor in 2019 was 1.906, and the 5-Year Impact Factor is 1.901. The 2019 Scopus CiteScore of JTAER is 3.4. For more information about JTAER, please visit https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jtaer.

As an Editorial Board Member, you would be responsible for:

(1) Pre-screening submissions and making decisions on whether they should be rejected or accepted for processing;

(2) Recommending timely topics and suggesting potential Guest Editors;

(3) Editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research;

(4) Publishing one paper per year, free of charge, in open access;

(5) Identifying appropriate conferences for editors to attend;

(6) Promoting JTAER and increasing its visibility at related academic conferences.

To apply or request further information, please send your full academic CV and a short statement of interest to the JTAER Editorial Office (jtaer@mdpi.com).

We believe that through your expertise in combination with our rigorous editorial policies, we can produce a high-quality journal. We thank you in advance for your interest and look forward to collaborating with you.

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.