Announcements

MDPI will be attending the China Instrument and Control Society Annual Meeting, which is to be held in Shanghai, China, on 27–29 August 2021. The conference invites experts and students who are engaged in the study of instrumentation to participate in an in-depth discussion on the basic research direction, technological innovation, and industrial path of the instrumentation discipline.

The following MDPI journals will be represented at the meeting:

• Sensors;
• Machines;
• ASI;
• Electronics;
• Photonics.

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth: C-01. Our delegates are looking forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://meeting.cis.org.cn/.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Antonio J. Marques Cardoso has been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of Machines (ISSN ISSN 2075-1702).

Prof. Dr. Antonio J. Marques Cardoso received his Dipl. Eng., Dr. Eng., and Habilitation degrees from the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, in 1985, 1995 and 2008, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. From 1985 until 2011, he was with the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, where he was Director of the Electrical Machines Laboratory. Since 2011, he has been with the University of Beira Interior (UBI), Covilhã, Portugal, where he is Full Professor at the Department of Electromechanical Engineering and Director of CISE—Electromechatronic Systems Research Centre (http://cise.ubi.pt). He was Vice-Rector of UBI (2013–2014). His teaching interests cover electrical machines, power electronics and drives, maintenance management, and fault diagnosis of electromechatronic systems, and his research interests are focused on diagnosis and fault tolerance of electrical machines, power electronics and drives.

He is the author of a book entitled Fault Diagnosis in Three-Phase Induction Motors (Coimbra, Portugal: Coimbra Editora, 1991), (in Portuguese), editor of a book entitled Diagnosis and Fault Tolerance of Electrical Machines, Power Electronics and Drives (IET/SciTech, UK, 2018), and also author of around 500 papers published in technical journals and conference proceedings.

Prof. Dr. Cardoso has spent two sabbatical years (2009/2010 and 2016/2017) at the Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), and he has also been an Invited Visiting Professor at several universities abroad: Vaxjo University, Sweden (2003, 2004, 2008), University of Vigo, Spain (2003, 2004 and 2005), University of Minas Gerais, Brazil (2006), University of Sciences and Technology of Oran, Algeria (2007), University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia (2009, 2014 and 2016), Sapienza University of Rome, Italy (2007, 2008, 2009 and 2011), Universidad Autónoma de Occidente, Cali, Colombia (2011 and 2014), University Mohamed Khider, Biskra, Algeria (2012 and 2018), Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia (2015), Aalto University, Espoo, Finland (2015), Coventry University, Coventry, UK (2016, 2020), Technische Universitat Wien, Vienna, Austria (2017), INP-ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France (2017) and Aalborg University, Denmark (2018).

He has been acting as European Union Expert Evaluator; Independent Scientific Expert of the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR); Independent Scientific Expert of the Polish Centre for Research and Development; Independent Scientific Expert of the University of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates); Independent Scientific Expert of the University of Agder (Norway); Independent Scientific Expert of the National Science Centre (Poland); External Consultant of the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente (Colombia); Independent Scientific Expert of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Bational funding agency for science, research and technology).

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Antonio J. Marques Cardoso as our Editor-in-Chief and are confident that his experience and expertise will help Machines continue to grow.

Prof. Dr. Antonio J. Marques Cardoso
Affiliation: CISE—Electromechatronic Systems Research Centre, Department of Electromechanical Engineering, University of Beira Interior, Calçada Fonte do Lameiro, P - 6201-001 Covilhã, Portugal
Email: ajmcardoso@ieee.org
Interests: diagnosis and fault tolerance of electrical machines; power electronics and drives
Web: http://www.cise.ubi.pt/index.php?op=details&user=5

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.

To expand our contribution to the Mechanical Engineering community, Machines is recruiting scientists to join the Journal Board: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/machines.

Should you decide to serve on the Journal Board, you will be responsible for one or some of the following tasks:

• Reviewing a couple of manuscripts per year;
• Editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research, plus making final decisions for submitted papers;
• Recommending timely topics and suggesting potential Guest Editors;
• Identifying appropriate conferences for Editors to attend;
• Promoting the journal.

Machines (ISSN 2571-8789) is an open access international journal on machinery, manufacturing and engineering. It was launched in 2013 and has been indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)-Web of Science, Scopus, Inspec and will receive its first Impact Factor in June 2021. Its CiteScore is 3.2 (Scopus). Machines ranks 92/340(Q2) in the category “Engineering: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering” and 184/585 (Q2) in the category “Engineering: Mechanical Engineering”.

As we provide a low-cost publishing service in open access format, we, unfortunately, cannot pay our Editor Members an honorarium. The term of the membership is two years and after that period it can be renewed.

We believe that your expertise, together with our rigorous editorial policies, can build a high-standard journal specifically dedicated to mechanical research. If you are interested in becoming a Journal Editor for Machines, please send your full academic CV and a short cover letter that details your interest and enthusiasm for the position to machines@mdpi.com before 31 August 2021.

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 the establishment of ten new sections of Machines to cover the innovative technologies and applications in the following fields of mechanical engineering:

• Machines Testing and Maintenance;
• Automation Systems;
• Mechatronic and Intelligent Machines;
• Advanced Manufacturing;
• Machine Design and Theory;
• Industrial Design and Chemical Machinery;
• Vehicle Engineering;
• Energy and Power Engineering;
• Engineering Materials;
• Bioengineering Technology.

Machines (ISSN 2075-1702; CODEN: MACHCV) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal on machinery and engineering published quarterly online by MDPI. The IFToMM are affiliated with Machines and its members receive a discount on the article processing charges.

Machines is covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)—Web of Science and will receive its first impact factor in 2021.

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 Machines Editorial Office (machines@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you.

To expand our contribution to the Mechanical Engineering community, we are recruiting scientists to join our Editorial Board.

We encourage applications from researchers with a background in a wide range of subject areas (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/machines/sections). Should you decide to serve on the Editorial Board, you would be responsible for some of the following tasks depending on your availability:

- Reviewing a couple of manuscripts per year;
- Editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research, and making final decisions for submitted papers;
- Recommending timely topics and suggesting potential guest editors;
- Publishing one paper per year, free of charge, in open access format;
- Identifying appropriate conferences for editors to attend;
- Promoting the journal.

Machines (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/machines) is an international open access journal, led by the Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Hamid Reza Karimi from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Machines is covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) – Web of Science and will receive its first impact factor in 2021.

As we provide a low-cost publishing service in open access format, we, unfortunately, cannot pay our Editorial Board Members an honorarium. The term of the Editorial Board membership is two years and after that period it can be renewed.

We believe that your expertise together with our rigorous editorial policies can build a high-standard journal specifically dedicated to mechanical research. If you are interested in becoming an Editorial Board Member for Machines, please send your full academic CV and a short cover letter that details your interest and enthusiasm for the position to machines@mdpi.com, before 10 March 2021.

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.

We are pleased to announce that Machines has switched to monthly publication. A monthly publication allows papers to be indexed in Web of Science and other indexing databases on a monthly basis rather than every 3 months, and they become searchable and are cited earlier.