Announcements

We are pleased to announce that the new journal Hydrobiology (ISSN 2673-9917) has established companionship with its sister journals Life (ISSN 2075-1729) and Water (ISSN 2073-4441).

Hydrobiology is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal related to the science of life and life processes in water. It publishes regular research articles, reviews, and short notes. Our aim is to encourage scientists to publish their experimental and theoretical results in as much detail as possible. There is no restriction on the length of the papers. The full experimental details must be provided so that results can be reproduced.

We welcome cross-disciplinary research at the molecular, organism, and ecosystem level on all aspects of aquatic ecosystems and biodiversity conservation ranging from freshwater fauna and flora to marine habitats. For details on the background and scope of this journal, please click on this link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/hydrobiology/about.

We offer a full waiver on article processing charges for papers submitted before 15 November 2021. Manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision provided to authors approximately 15 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 3 days (median values for MDPI journals in the second half of 2020). If accepted after peer review, your paper will be published in open access format.

Manuscripts can be submitted via the journal’s online submission system at: https://susy.mdpi.com/user/manuscripts/upload?journal=hydrobiology.

Read Publisher’s Note to Launch Hydrobiology here.

We cordially invite you to consider Hydrobiology as the platform for publishing your work.

Hydrobiology Editorial Office
hydrobiology@mdpi.com

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

Life is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of scientific studies related to fundamental themes in life sciences. It has been covered by leading indexing services, including the SCIE (Web of Science) (search for "Life-Basel"), Scopus, PubMed, etc. The 2020 Impact Factor was 3.817. More information about our journal can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/life

The Life editorial team is pleased to announce this open call for Special Issue proposals, which offers a group of authors the opportunity to work on an interconnected set of papers on an innovative topic. We are soliciting high-quality proposals that will be evaluated in a continuous selection process throughout the year.

Proposals for a Special Issue should have a well-articulated unifying topic and reflect on an international level, the best work in a particular research area (either an established or an important emerging area), in which future investigations may be propelled by the publication of a set of novel research papers. Hence, an international group of Guest Editors and a few high-quality planned papers are always encouraged when it comes to proposals.

Proposals for Special Issues must be sent to the Editorial Office (life@mdpi.com), which will then forward them to the Editors-in-Chief of Life for evaluation.

Information to be provided in a proposal:

- A 300–500-word summary that clearly states the significance, novelty, technical advancement, and adherence to the scope of the journal of the proposed topic;

- A few keywords on the topic;

- A plan for obtaining high-quality papers or a list of at least three planned papers;

- A brief resume of the proposed Guest Editors, together with their information (title, name, email, affiliation, personal website, keywords of interests);

- A proposed submission deadline (a Special Issue will usually be open for submissions for 6–8 months);

- 10 confirmed contributors.

Guest Editor(s) Role:

Once the proposal is accepted, the Guest Editor will circulate the Call for Papers for the Special Issue and invite submissions.

The Guest Editor has the privilege of publishing one paper free of charge (with the CHF 1600 publication fee waived) in this Special Issue and of inviting some feature papers to be published with a special discount.

Each submission will undergo a formal peer-review process, after which the assigned Editor will ask the Guest Editor, the Editor-in-Chief, or a suitable Editorial Board Member to decide whether the paper is acceptable for publication in Life.

If ten or more papers are published in this Special Issue, a Special Issue book can be organized, and a hard copy will be sent to each Guest Editor.

Editorial Office’s Role

The Editorial Office will set up the Special Issue website, arrange promotional material, assist with invitations to contribute papers, and take care of the administrative tasks associated with peer review, including inviting reviewers, collating reports, contacting authors, and arranging professional production before publication.

Please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office (life@mdpi.com) if you are interested and would like further details and clarifications.

We look forward to receiving your creative proposals.

Life Editorial Office

Life is recruiting Section Editors-in-Chief for the following three new Sections:

• Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering;
• Ecology;
• Animal Science.

Section Editors-in-Chief are responsible for the following:

• Defining the Aims and Scope of the Section;
• Advising on the strategic development of the Section;
• Ensuring the quality of the published content;
• Nominating/inviting Guest Editors and optionally delegating to them the authority to make final acceptance decisions for submitted articles;
• Nominating/inviting contributors;
• Nominating and leading the Section Editorial Board;
• Promoting the journal at scientific conferences or through other venues.

To apply for this position, recommend potential candidates, or request further information, please contact the Life Editorial Office (life@mdpi.com) before 30 September 2021.

Life (ISSN ISSN: 2075-1729; Impact Factor: 3.817) is an international, peer-reviewed, scientific, open access journal concerned with the fundamental themes in the field of life sciences. It is indexed by the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science), Scopus, PubMed, and other important databases.

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.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Kousuke Hanada has been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the new Section “Plant Science” in Life.

Dr. Kousuke Hanada is a Professor in the Department of Bioscience and Bioinformatics of Kyusyu Institute of Technology, Japan. Prof. Dr. Hanada completed his PhD studies at Graduate University for Advanced Studies before completing his postdoc at the National Institute of Genetics, Ecology & Evolution Department of University of Chicago and Plant Biology Department of Michigan State University. After this, Prof. Dr. Kousuke Hanada visited RIKEN as a researcher. Following which, at the end of 2020, he became a professor. Prof. Dr. Kousuke Hanada’s group has solid knowledge of plant biology, plant genomics and plant evolution, with a particular emphasis on plant genome analysis and plant diversity analysis.

Prof. Dr. Kousuke Hanada has published 115 scientific publications in international peer-reviewed scientific journals.

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Kousuke Hanada as the Editor-in-Chief of the Section "Plant Science", and we look forward to Life achieving many more milestones under his leadership.

For further information please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/sections/Plant_Sci.

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)

To assist health workers and researchers working under challenging conditions to bring this pandemic to its end, Life has created a new section called “COVID and Life”. This section welcomes articles and reviews related to the COVID-19 pandemic and Life is committed to disseminating high-quality research as quickly as possible. All content related to the COVID-19 pandemic is freely available.

The following Special Issues of this section are currently open for submissions:

• Ecology, Evolution and Epidemiology of Coronaviruses (Deadline: 25 May 2021)
• Neutralizing-Antibody-Based Treatments for COVID-19: Achievements and Lessons Learnt for Future Pandemics (Deadline: 31 August 2021)
• Old and New Pandemics: Challenges for Humans (Deadline: 30 September 2021)

Life (ISSN 2075-1729; CODEN: LBSIB7) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal of scientific studies related to the fundamental themes in life sciences, published monthly online by MDPI.

If you are interested in submitting a manuscript to the new sections mentioned above, please click here.

To propose or request further information, please contact the Life Editorial Office (life@mdpi.com).