Announcements

ChatGPT is a language model launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It has many uses, including chatbots, text summarization, language translation, and content creation. Educators view it as potentially concerning, as it offers powerful opportunities for students to produce work for assessment. Some have experimented with ChatGPT and are amazed by the quality of outputs; however, there are calls for a pause in AI development due to concerns about its impact. We hope that the established MDPI Topic “AI Chatbots: Threat or Opportunity?” will provide a suitable communication platform.

“AI Chatbots: Threat or Opportunity?”
by Antony Bryant
Informatics 2023, 10(2), 49; https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics10020049 

“SAPBERT: Speaker-Aware Pretrained BERT for Emotion Recognition in Conversation”
by Seunguook Lim and Jihie Kim
Algorithms 2023, 16(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/a16010008

“Challenges and Limitations of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research: A Perspective from Organic Materials”
by Hao-Wen Cheng
AI 2023, 4(2), 401-405; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai4020021

“The Role of ChatGPT in Data Science: How AI-Assisted Conversational Interfaces Are Revolutionizing the Field”
by Hossein Hassani and Emmanuel Sirmal Silva
Big Data Cogn. Comput. 2023, 7(2), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc7020062

“Can ChatGPT Help in Electronics Research and Development? A Case Study with Applied Sensors”
by Zoltán Tafferner, Illés Balázs, Olivér Krammer and Attila Géczy
Sensors 2023, 23(10), 4879; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23104879  

“ChatGPT Challenges Blended Learning Methodologies in Engineering Education: A Case Study in Mathematics”
by Luis M. Sánchez-Ruiz, Santiago Moll-López, Adolfo Nuñez-Pérez, José Antonio Moraño-Fernández and Erika Vega-Fleitas
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(10), 6039; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13106039  

“ChatGPT for Education and Research: Opportunities, Threats, and Strategies”
by Md. Mostafizer Rahman and Yutaka Watanobe
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(9), 5783; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13095783

“Info-Autopoiesis and the Limits of Artificial General Intelligence”
by Jaime F. Cárdenas-García
Computers 2023, 12(5), 102; https://doi.org/10.3390/computers12050102

“ChatGPT in Supply Chains: Initial Evidence of Applications and Potential Research Agenda”
by Guilherme Francisco Frederico
Logistics 2023, 7(2), 26; https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics7020026

“What Is the Impact of ChatGPT on Education? A Rapid Review of the Literature”
by Chung Kwan Lo
Educ. Sci. 2023, 13(4), 410; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13040410

Topics Webinar | AI Chatbots: Threat or Opportunity?
Date and time: 27 June 2023 at 3:00 p.m. (CEST)

Topics Webinar | AI Chatbots: Threat or Opportunity? II
Date and time: 10 July 2023 at 3:00 p.m. (CEST)
This is a free webinar. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information on how to join the webinar

On 27 June 2023, MDPI, and the journals AI, Algorithms, Big Data and Cognitive Computing (BDCC), Future Internet, Informatics, Information, Languages and Publications, organized the webinar AI Chatbots: Threat or Opportunity?.

The first presentation, delivered by Dr. Ibrahim Demir, tackled “AI Chatbots: Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Research, Education and Practice”. Dr. Demir is the Director of the UI Hydroinformatics Lab and serves as an Associate Professor in both the Civil and Environmental Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA.

The second presenter was Dr. Haridimos Kondylakis, who presented his paper on “SummaryGPT: Leveraging ChatGPT for Summarizing Knowledge Graphs”. He is a researcher with FORTH-ICS in Greece.

Please note that this webinar is associated with the Topic titled “AI Chatbots: Threat or Opportunity?”. The abstract submission deadline is 29 February 2024.

In addition, the second webinar of the series will be held on 10 July 2023, 3 p.m. (CEST). For more information, or to register for the webinar, please visit the webpage via the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/6117.

You can watch the recorded webinar at the following link: https://youtu.be/lWEDnfGObzI.

Keynote Speakers:

• Ibrahim Demir, University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA;
• Haridimos Kondylakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece.

We are pleased to inform you that the Open Access journal Languages (ISSN: 2226-471X) has been indexed in the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR): Area 10 - Class A. We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to all authors, reviewers, and editors who have contributed to this journal and enabled this achievement.

Languages is an international, scholarly journal whose central concern is the promotion of understanding the world’s languages in all their diversity. We aim to present discussions and developments of multidisciplinary research and thereby generate broad and practical applications for the study of languages in the world of today. Contributions from scholars and researchers working within the framework of any linguistic and theoretical approach are welcome. Languages publishes articles, reviews, commentaries, and communications without restrictions on a submission’s length. The working language is English. However, research on all languages is welcome.

We warmly welcome you to consider Languages as the platform for publishing your work.

Languages Editorial Office

As a leading open access publisher, MDPI provides scholars with a high-quality and rich academic exchange platform by continuously expanding into new and exciting research areas.

In December 2022, MDPI launched five new journals, covering multiple subjects such as life sciences, biology, medicine and pharmacology, social sciences and humanities. These new journals are being edited by established scholars across the world.

If you are interested in creating more open access journals with us to publish cutting-edge research, please send your journal proposal application to newjournal-committee@mdpi.com.

MDPI is pleased to announce that we now display the co-authors’ email addresses in addition to the corresponding author’s email address on the webpage of published papers, protected by Captcha. For more information about this change, please visit the journal’s instructions for authors page. 

We believe this change will facilitate academic discussions and advance our cause of open science and research. The corresponding authors are responsible for communicating with their co-authors and indicating in our system (https://susy.mdpi.com/) if co-authors would prefer for their email addresses not to be displayed.

On 9 February 2023, Clarivate, a global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics, added the Preprint Citation Index to the Web of Science platform, streamlining the research process by allowing researchers to locate and link to preprints alongside other trusted content in the database.

The Preprint Citation Index will act as a bridge to connect cutting-edge preprints with peer-reviewed journal articles published within the Web of Science Core Collection. Alerts can be easily set to monitor new research across several repositories and authors will also be able to include preprints on their Web of Science Research Profile to more accurately display their various research outputs.

As of its launch, the Preprint Citation Index will provide nearly two million preprints from various repositories, including MDPI’s own Preprints.org.

MDPI's Preprints Platform – Preprints.org

To advance Open Science and the fast dissemination of research, MDPI offers researchers a free multidisciplinary preprint platform. Preprints.org accepts submissions from all research areas and offers authors high visibility, permanent archiving, article-level Metrics and immediately citable content by assigning a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to all preprints.

During submission to any MDPI journal, authors have the option to share their research as a preprint. After an initial screening, the manuscript is available online in 48 hours or less. Once online, preprints can be downloaded, shared, commented on, and cited, providing authors maximum visibility.

We invite you to join the ranks of the over 100k researchers using Preprints.org and share your research.

For more information, please visit Preprints.org.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Jeanine Treffers-Daller has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Languages (ISSN: 2226-471X).

Prof. Dr. Jeanine Treffers-Daller is the professor of multilingualism at the University of Reading, UK. She is interested in a wide range of areas in the field of multilingualism and second language acquisition. Most recently, she has worked on the relationship between cognitive control and different types of code-switching behavior. She is also interested in measuring language dominance in bilinguals/heritage speakers and has published an edited volume on this topic with Cambridge.

Furthermore, Prof. Dr. Treffers-Daller has published on motion event construal, formulaic language, vocabulary learning and teaching, lexical richness, and automated assessment of vocabulary in bilinguals and second language learners. She has also worked on language, literacy, and mathematics development among learners with English as an additional language (EAL) in the UK and among multilingual children in India.

The following is a Q&A with Prof. Dr. Jeanine Treffers-Daller, who shared her vision for the journal with us, as well as her views of the research area and Open Access publishing:

1. What is your vision for the journal?

I would like to see Languages as a platform for interdisciplinary research, where researchers make an effort to look beyond the boundaries of their own narrow field, toward more integrated perspectives on issues around language. Innovation is more likely to come from researchers who are new to a field and bring a fresh perspective to old problems. A good example is the contribution made to the field of linguistic relativity by researchers working in the field of bilingualism.

I am fully aware that it is challenging to do interdisciplinary research because researchers from other fields do not share our basic assumptions and work with different theories and methods. It is my dream that STEM researchers and linguists work together to tackle the problems of 2023. One very popular field of research in bilingualism and second language acquisition is motion event construal (how animate beings or objects move through space). Would it not be very inspiring to hear from researchers working on visual perception on how they analyze movement through space and try to set up joint work? We have a lot to learn from each other. Such joint work could then be published in both Languages and another Open Access journal published by MDPI.

2. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to become its Editor-in-Chief?

In 2022, I edited a Special Issue of Languages on code-switching together with two colleagues. This was a great experience, not only the intellectual journey of putting the Special Issue together and attracting key researchers to join us, but also the practical issues of liaising with the Languages team. I found the MDPI team very helpful, professional, friendly at all times, and willing to go the extra mile to help us put the Special Issue together. I am fascinated by the idea of leading the journal for two years and seeing if I can help develop its profile among the research community even further. Particularly the fact that the turnaround for publications is very short in comparison with some other journals appealed to me. This means that new ideas get to the research community very quickly and the readers can start developing their own projects based on recent publications. I also like the fact that Languages supported a prize for the best poster at Eurosla (the annual conference of the European Second Language Acquisition Conference). Particularly when the prize goes to junior colleagues, this can give them a real boost.

3. What does the future of this field of language research look like?

In any field of research, the collaboration between colleagues is key. While in the past, single-authored monographs were the holy grail, nowadays we are aware that the best ideas come from research teams that work together and inspire each other. For junior researchers, it is also often a good idea to publish work with their supervisors, because the chances of being read are simply higher if a well-known name is on the paper. It is good that we have to specify what the contribution of each author to the paper has been, as we need such transparency. Apart from the issue of collaboration between colleagues, I think it will be crucially important to keep up with technological innovation, both in collecting data and in analyzing these with up-to-date software. We will also need to look into the impact of ChatGPT (software that can write essays) on the manuscripts we receive for Languages. I assume the Editorial Board will focus strongly on the role of technology in publishing in the coming years.

4. What do you think of the development of Open Access literature in the publishing field?

It is very important for papers to be available freely through the website so that researchers in low-income countries can also benefit from accessing the papers. I have been to India, China, and Malaysia on research projects. For many researchers in those countries, accessing up-to-date research is very difficult. Also, Ph.D. applicants from low-income countries often base their project proposals on literature that is out of date, simply because they cannot access more recent literature. For them, Open Access articles are incredibly important. Ph.D. applicants from overseas have a much better chance to inform themselves before applying for a position in Europe or America because of the availability of Open Access articles in journals such as Languages.

5. Can you share your career development story briefly? For example, what cases have influenced you the most?

I studied French and general linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and was lucky enough to have Prof. Dr. Pieter Muysken as my supervisor. The quality of his work as a researcher and the amazing ways in which he supported his Ph.D. students (and those of others) have greatly inspired me. After graduating, I was very fortunate to be able to work at Bogazici University, one of the great universities in Turkey. Learning Turkish and living in a very different culture opened my eyes and broadened my horizons in ways that no other experience could have done. When we moved to the UK, I also started to do research into applied linguistics (vocabulary studies, listening and reading comprehension, etc.) because many of my Ph.D. students wanted to do applied linguistics research. Although I started my career as a sociolinguist, working together with psycholinguists triggered my interest in doing more experimental work. Prof. Dr. Francois Grosjean from Neuchatel and Prof. Dr. Shana Poplack from Ottawa have also greatly inspired me and supported me in my career. I owe a lot to colleagues across the world. Working together with other researchers, particularly colleagues from other countries and other fields is so rewarding. I am sure other researchers feel the same.

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We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Jeanine Treffers-Daller as our new Editor-in-Chief and look forward to her valuable input for the continued success of Languages. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the previous Editors-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Raquel Fernández Fuertes and Prof. Dr. Juana M. Liceras, for their invaluable contributions to the journal.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative—the MDPI Special Issue Mentor Program.

This program will enable early career researchers (who must hold a Ph.D. in a related field) to experience editing a Special Issue in MDPI journals, under the mentorship of our experienced Editorial Board Members or other experienced scientists. The mentor program will provide an excellent opportunity for early career scientists to gain editorial experience, and to cultivate their ability to edit scientific research.

The mentee’s responsibilities include:

• Proposing a Special Issue title and assisting the mentor in preparing a summary (around 200–400 words) and 3–10 keywords describing the background, importance, and goal of the Issue;
• Writing a brief promotion plan for the Special Issue;
• Preparing a list of scholars who may be interested in the Issue and personally e-mailing invitations on behalf of Guest Editors;
• Writing an editorial for the online Special Issue together with the mentor.

The mentor’s responsibilities include:

• Conducting a final check before the Special Issue is published online;
• Performing editorial control of the Special Issue and quality control of the publications, both of which must be carried out in a timely manner;
• Providing suggestions to younger scholars if they have any doubts or concerns regarding submissions;
• Organizing video calls with young scholars and the Editorial Office regularly to discuss problems and improvement suggestions for the Special Issue;
• Making and submitting decisions regarding submissions with the assistance of mentees.

Certificates and awards:
After the Special Issue closes, the Editorial Office will provide official certificates for all the mentors and early career researchers.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your Special Issue proposal to the Editorial Office of a journal you choose, and we will discuss the process (i.e., mentor collaboration, Special Issue topic feasibility analysis, etc.) in further detail. The full list of MDPI journals is as follows: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals.

In addition to the new Special Issue Mentor Program, we will continue to welcome all Special Issue proposals focusing on hot research topics.

MDPI has just become the first open access (OA) publisher to reach the milestone of one million articles published. That is one million articles freely available to all, to circulate and build upon! We are proud to share this special moment with the global scientific community.

This landmark has been reached thanks to the immeasurable support of more than 600,000 expert reviewers, 66,000 editorial board members and 6700 hard-working colleagues across MDPI’s global offices.

Within more than 25 years of publishing, our journals received 2.1 million manuscripts and generated 4.6 million peer review reports to get to one million papers published.

Reaching the milestone of one million articles published reinforces our mission to remove any existing barriers and to make scientific research accessible to all. Since its inception, MDPI’s goal has been to create reliable processes to make science open. This is a path towards facilitating the dissemination of novel insights in scientific communities.

Regular feedback from authors and reviewers shows that our service is greatly appreciated and needed. At the same time, the feedback helps us identify areas for further improvement.

As it stands, a significant share of published research findings remain closed access. More than half of the content published with the most well-known legacy publishers stays behind a paywall, and that is not including articles published in hybrid OA journals, or made available months or years after publication.

A new policy announced by the US administration in August 2022 requires that, as of January 2026, all US federally funded research be made freely and immediately available after publication. While the new policy does not mandate articles be published under an open access license, it is aligned with the open access movement in removing all barriers to research. Similarly, some of the most advanced research institutions in the world intend to have all funded research articles published in open access by 2025.

MDPI is proud to be the leading agent of the transition to open access.

"Thanks a Million" to all the contributors!

We are currently recruiting Editorial Board Members (EBMs) for MDPI journals indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in Web of Science. In particular, we are looking for experts who are interested in aiding in the development of our journals and safeguarding the scientific quality of the published findings.

Journals currently listed in the ESCI will receive an Impact Factor in June 2023, according to the changes announced by Web of Science (Clarivate). Therefore, this is an excellent time to become an Editorial Board Member for one of these fast-developing journals.

If you are interested in sharing your expertise in one of the journals listed below, please send us an application using this link.

The Editorial Office of the journal will contact you once the application has been approved.
Editorial Board Members are responsible for academic decisions on manuscripts in their field of expertise, will edit Special Issues, and may be invited to review manuscripts. The initial term lasts for two years, after which it can be renewed, and entails the following:

• Prescreening and making decisions on new submissions related to your research interests;
• Setting up at least one Special Issue during your term on a topic related to your research interests (or supervising Special Issues related to your research field);
• Providing input or feedback regarding journal policies;
• Helping to promote the journal among your peers or at conferences;
• Attending Board meetings to suggest journal development strategies;
• Reviewing manuscripts.

Editorial Board Members are entitled to a full waiver on one publication per year in the journal that they serve and need to be experts in their fields.

The list of ESCI journals can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals/esci.

Please find the list of ESCI journals, categorized by subject, for which we are recruiting Editorial Board Members below.