Announcements

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).

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the Life 2020 Young Investigator Awards are Prof. Dr. Luning Liu and Dr. David E. Olson.

Prof. Dr. Luning Liu is Chair of Microbial Bioenergetics and Bioengineering and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Institute of Integrative Biology, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the biosynthesis and functions of photosynthetic membranes, macromolecular assemblies, and organelles, as well as engineering bio-machineries for various biotechnological applications. He has published over 60 high-profile papers. As PI and co-PI, Dr. Liu has secured GBP 3.0M and GBP 4.5M funds.

Dr. David E. Olson is a chemical neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on understanding how small molecules like psychedelics influence neural plasticity, learning, memory, and mood. By harnessing compound-induced neuroplasticity, Dr. Olson’s group is developing next-generation neurotherapeutics to treat a variety of brain disorders.

As awardees, Prof. Dr. Liu and Dr. Olson will each receive an honorarium of 1000 CHF and the opportunity to publish one paper free of charge before 31 December 2021 in Life, after peer review.

We want to thank all the excellent young scientists who applied for this award as their brilliant CVs made the choice very difficult. We would also like to thank all of the Award Committee Members for their thorough evaluation of the applications.

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.