Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Christine Fürst has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Land (ISSN 2073-445X, IF 3.395, CiteScore 3.0).

Prof. Dr. Christine Fürst is by training a forest scientist (LMU Munich, 1998) and obtained her Ph.D. as Dr. rer. silv. at TU Dresden in 2010. Since 2005, she has specialized in social–ecological systems research and since 2007, in an interdisciplinary process, she has developed an integrated land use change modeling and impact assessment software platform, GISCAME. In 2013, she passed her habilitation at the University of Bonn with venia legendi in natural resource management. In 2015, she moved to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research; and then, in 2016, moved, first as interim, and later as full professor for Sustainable Landscape Development, to Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Christine funded the European Land-Use Institute in 2011 and established the European Nodal Office of GLP in 2012. She is currently engaged in the scientific board of the Ecosystem Service Partnership and she is the lead author of the IPBES regional assessments, ECA region for chapters 5 and 6. From 2015 to 2019, she was president of the International Association of Landscape Ecology and is now past-president until 2023. Christine served in the context of Future Earth and in the development team of the Food–Energy–Water Nexus Knowledge Action Network. Her main research interests currently lie in integrative landscape modeling and impact assessment by means of a system of systems and in participatory decision processes in urban and regional spatial planning. Her regional research focus lies beyond Europe, in West Africa and Latin America.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Christine Fürst:

1. What do you like about being the Editor-in-Chief of Land? How would you like to develop Land?

It is an opportunity to accompany the community of land system scientists and develop a platform for publications in this field. I have a passion for co-developing the philosophy and concepts of publications so that emerging inter- and transdisciplinary publication trends can find better reflection through innovative publication formats. It is also a good chance to cooperate with all the colleagues, the section editors, and manifold members of the editorial board to exchange and enhance our understanding of the key challenges and future thematic areas where land system sciences can contribute to solving societal and environmental challenges.

2. Is Open Access popular among land scientists? What might your response be to Open Access skeptics?

I think Open Access has become more and more the publication model, particularly since the research funders require the accessibility of the publications, which is not given in no-open access models. Accessibility also increases awareness and, thus, the impact of published research, which makes it more rewarding. Additionally, it contributes to fairness toward scientists in developing countries who otherwise would not have access to recent knowledge. As long as publication fees are reasonable for all the publisher's work at the back-end and, if needed, support is provided to young scholars or scholars from developing countries, it is the best model to share knowledge globally.

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Christine Fürst as our Editor-in-Chief and look forward to her valuable input for the continued success of Land.

Land Editorial Office

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

Land (ISSN: 2073-445X) is an international and cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal of land use/land change, land management, land system science, landscape, soil–sediment-water systems, urban contexts, urban–rural interactions, land–climate interactions, etc., published monthly online by MDPI. It is the only open access journal covering all aspects of land science, indexed within Scopus, SSCI (Web of Science), AGRICOLA, AGRIS, GeoRef, RePEc, and many other databases. Land has received an increased CiteScore (2020 Scopus data) of 3.0, and its 2020 Impact Factor is 3.395.

Land’s new Section “Landscape Architecture” (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land/sections/landscape_architecture)  is now recruiting Editorial Board Members!

The main responsibilities of the Section Editorial Board Members are as follows:

1) Supervising the quality of the papers in this Section (when we have new submissions to the Section);

2) Acting as a/recommending a Guest Editor for a Special Issue on a topic related to your research interests;

3) Providing conference/society cooperation recommendations.

This position is open to experts in all aspects of landscape architecture. To apply for this position, recommend potential candidates, or request further information, please contact the Land Editorial Office (land@mdpi.com) or Nacy Jiang (nacy.jiang@mdpi.com).

In June 2021, Landscape Institute (LI) chose Land as its preferred journal and became an affiliated society member. As part of this collaboration, all members of LI will enjoy a discount on the article processing charge (APC) when submitting articles to Land.

Landscape Institute (LI) is a professional organization whose functions are highly relevant to the scope of Land. We look forward to collaborating with LI and publishing state-of-the-art research from its members in this field.

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)

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)

The journal Land is launching a new position—Reviewer Board Member. The main responsibility of the new Members of the Reviewer Board is to regularly provide timely high-quality reports on submitted manuscripts. The responsibilities of reviewers are available here (https://www.mdpi.com/reviewers).

Land (ISSN 2073-445X) is an international and crossdisciplinary peer-reviewed open access journal of land use/land change, land management, land system science, landscape, soil-sediment-water systems, urban contexts and urban-rural interactions, and land–climate interactions, etc., published monthly online by MDPI. International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE) and European Land-use Institute (ELI) are affiliated with Land and their members receive a discount on the article processing charge.

The benefits of joining the Reviewer Board of Land are as follows:

(1) The Land Editorial Board will acknowledge all Reviewer Board (RB) Members in its annual reviewer list, to be published in the "Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Land This Year” of the journal website;

(2) The board will present special recognition certificates to "Exceptional Reviewer Board Members". Exceptional reviewers are those recommended by editors for special recognition due to their outstanding review work;

(3) Reviewer Board Members will have the chance to be nominated as candidates for our Outstanding Reviewer Award. You can find more details at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land/awards/927;

(4) Reviewer Board Members may be presented with the possibility to join the Editorial Board of the journal (subject to the approval of the Editor-in-Chief).

If you are interested in this role or if you have any recommendations, please feel free to contact us (land@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

For more information about the Land, please visit the website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land.

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.