Materials has opened a new Section “Metals and Alloys” and is now recruiting new Editorial Board Members for this Section.

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

1) Promoting this new Section on your social media or among your acquaintances;

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

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

4) Providing any conferences/society cooperation recommendation.

Materials (ISSN: 1996-1944) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal published semi-monthly online by MDPI. It publishes reviews, regular research papers (articles), and communications that advance the in-depth understanding of the relationship between the structure, the properties, and the functions of all kinds of materials. It is abstracted and indexed by SCIE, Scopus, and other databases. Citations are available in PubMed, and full texts are archived in PubMed Central. The 2019 IF for Materials was 3.057.

This position is open to experts in Metallic Materials. To apply for this position, recommend potential candidates, or request further information, please contact the Materials Editorial Office ([email protected]) or Anson Geng ([email protected]).

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)

Our journal Materials is planning to add a new section “Advanced and Functional Ceramics” and now recruiting new Editorial Board Members for this section (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/materials/sections/Advanced_Functional_Ceramics).

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

1. promoting this new section at your social media or among your acquaintances;
2. supervising the quality of the papers in this section later (when we have new submissions in the section);
3. acting as a/recommending a Guest Editor for a Special Issue on a topic related to your research interests;
4. providing any conferences/society cooperation recommendation.

Materials (ISSN: 1996-1944) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published semi-monthly online by MDPI. It publishes reviews, regular research papers (articles), and communications that advance the in-depth understanding of the relationship between the structure, the properties, and the functions of all kinds of materials. It is abstracted and indexed by SCIE, Scopus, and other databases. Citations are available in PubMed and full-text archived in PubMed Central. The 2019 IF for Materials was 3.057.

This Position is Open to Experts in Ceramic Materials. To apply for this position, recommend potential candidates, or request further information, please contact the Materials Editorial Office ([email protected]) or Xinglian Yin ([email protected]).

At present, less than 30% of researchers in the world are women. In order to promote full and equal access to participation in science for women and girls, 11 February has been chosen as the “International Day of Women and Girls in Science” by UNESCO and UN Women.

In the continuing spirit of the “International Day of Women and Girls in Science”, Materials is proud to announce the Special Issue “Women in Science: Materials Science and Engineering”, to present the work of women researchers in the field of materials science and engineering.

This Special Issue is open for submissions (from original research to review articles) across all sections of the journal.

After 3 months of heated competition, we are pleased to announce the winners of the First Poster Competition on Materials Science, selected by the Evaluation Committee.

First Prize (CHF 500 and a 50% discount voucher)

Second Prize (CHF 300 and a 30% discount voucher each)

Third Prize (CHF 200 and a 20% discount voucher each)

Congratulations to the above winners! We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all participants for their support in our competition.

For a full list of posters, please see the Poster Panel: https://sciforum.net/conference/PCMS.

For any questions, please contact [email protected].

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.

We are pleased to acknowledge that many academic editors who have made an impact on MDPI journals as editorial board members, editors-in-chief, or section editors, are recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Highly Cited Researchers highlights the top 1% of researchers, by citations, in one or more of the 22 fields used in Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We offer our congratulations to 279 academic editors of MDPI journals who were recognized as the most influential scholars in their fields in 2020.

The full list of 2020 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed on https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2020/

--- Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) is a Clarivate product.

MDPI will be attending 2020 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit, to be held in virtual form from 27 November to 4 December 2020.

This conference is the key forum to present research to an interdisciplinary and international audience. It represents a window to the future of materials science and offers an opportunity for researchers—from students and postdoctoral fellows, to Nobel and Kavli Prize Laureates—to exchange technical information and connect with colleagues.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Materials
• Energies
• Metals
• Gels
• Technologies

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to start an online conversation with us. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference and our virtual booth, please visit: http://ii070.cn/Qi9MrG

Our journal Materials is recruiting new Editorial Board Members. We would like to invite you to visit our welcome message at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/materials/editors

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

1) Making decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted based on the reports we collect;

2) Reviewing a small number of papers per year;

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

4) Promoting Materials and increasing its visibility at related academic conferences.

Materials (ISSN: 1996-1944) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published semi-monthly online by MDPI. It publishes reviews, regular research papers (articles), and communications that advance the in-depth understanding of the relationship between the structure, the properties, and the functions of all kinds of materials. It is abstracted and indexed by SCIE, Scopus, and other databases. Citations are available in PubMed and full-text archived in PubMed Central. The 2019 IF for Materials was 3.057.

This Position is Open to Experts in Materials Science. To apply for this position (to one of our Sections), recommend potential candidates, or request further information, please contact the Materials Editorial Office ([email protected]) or Selina Yang ([email protected]).

We are pleased to announce that the 1st Corrosion and Materials Degradation Web Conference (CMDWC 2021), organized by the MDPI open-access journals Corrosion and Materials Degradation (CMD) and Materials, will be held on https://sciforum.net/conference/CMDWC2021 from 17 to 19 May 2021. The conference chairs are Prof. Raman Singh, Prof. Digby Macdonald, and Prof. Rhys Jones.

All corrosion scientists or engineers, as well as those associated with the mechanical degradation of materials, are welcome to join this event and share their findings around the following general and related themes. Note that this list is not exclusive.

• Mechanism and Predictive/Deterministic Aspects of Corrosion;
• Corrosion in Concrete and Porous Media;
• Materials Degradation in Defense and Civilian Aircrafts;
• Composite and Bonded Structures;
• Corrosion Assessment and Management;
• Atmospheric Corrosion of Materials;
• Microbiologically Influenced Corrosion;
• Corrosion-Barrier Coatings;
• Corrosion and Degradation of Biomaterials;
• Fatigue and Creep Degradations;
• Degradation of Additively Manufactured Materials;
• Corrosion in Nuclear Industries;
• High-Temperature Corrosion;
• Corrosion Mitigation.

Abstracts should be submitted by 20 March 2021 online. There is no registration fee for all participants (authors). Submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the conference committee. Following the conference, selected contributions will be invited for submission for publication in the journals Corrosion and Materials Degradation (CMD) and Materials (Impact Factor: 3.057).

Timeline:
Abstract Submission: 20 March 2021
Notification of Acceptance: 14 April 2021
Conference: 17–19 May 2021

For more information on IOCN2020, please visit the conference website (https://sciforum.net/conference/CMDWC2021) or contact us by email ([email protected]).

MDPI will be attending the China Materials Conference and Exhibition 2020, Qingdao, Shandong, China, November 19–21, 2020.

CMC's 19th annual meeting is the premier venue for the presentation in the field of materials sciences, where one can learn from experts, forge collaborations with peers, explore new tools and technologies, and advance their career.

The purpose of the conference is to build an exchange platform for experts, scholars, professors, scientific and technological workers, relevant government management departments and leaders, entrepreneurs, and related personnel, engaged in the scientific research, development, and industrialization of new materials in China to exchange and share the latest materials research achievements, in order to achieve the purpose of mutual promotion and common improvement.

There are many outstanding people in the committee of the meeting, such as Professor Boyun Huang and Academician Lian Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Professor Bingbo Wei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, etc. The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Coatings (leading journal);
• Materials;
• Crystals;
• Energies;
• Molecules;
• Metals;
• Nanomaterials;
• Polymers.
• Actuators
• Sustainability
• Membranes
• Technologies
• Gels
• ASI

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth C13). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://cmc2020.medcon.net.cn/cn/web/index/

At the request of the majority of scholars and considering the modification requirements for current submissions, we have decided to postpone the poster competition to 5 November 2020. Please check the competition details and submit all required documents via our official website.

Topic: All aspects of Materials Science.

Date: 5 August to 5 November

Submit your poster: https://sciforum.net/conference/PCMS

Requirements:

1. The content of the poster can be a comprehensive presentation of your recent research results or a summary of the cutting-edge research in your field. However, all posters must be related to Materials Science.
2. No copyright issues with any elements in the poster.
3. The minimum size for images is 148 mm × 210 mm (horizontal × vertical) at 300 dpi.
4. Posters should be in gif/jpg/png/jpeg/bmp format and no larger than 4 MB.
5. The poster should be submitted to the system along with a valid link on Twitter about the poster before 5 November.
6. Applicants should be PhD students or researchers with a PhD degree in Materials Science or a related field.

Required Application Documents:

1. A caption with poster title and brief introduction.
2. An updated CV and a scanned copy of the applicant’s doctorate/student certificate.
3. A link corresponding to a relevant tweet about the poster on Twitter.

To register for the poster prize:

1. Register and submit via Sciforum.
2. Tweet about your poster with the title, #MaterialsPoster, and any other relevant subject hashtag(s).
3. Share your poster with as many as people as possible.
4. Discuss and answer questions from the community or committee members.
5. Win a prize if your poster is selected as the best!

Evaluation criteria:

1. Number of likes/retweets of each entry by 5 December (20% of the total score)
2. Voting results by poster committee (80% of the total score)

• Originality/Novelty
• Interest to the readers
• Rich in content and coherent
• Significance of content

Prize:

First Prize: 500 CHF and a 50% discount voucher;

Second Prize: 300 CHF and a 30% discount voucher each;

Third Prize: 200 CHF and a 20% discount voucher each;

Note: The voucher can be applied to manuscripts submitted to Materials before 31 December 2021.

The winners will be announced on the Materials website and on Twitter by end of December.

For any questions, please contact [email protected].

We are happy to announce that Professor Noam Eliaz from Tel-Aviv University, an Editorial Board Member of Materials, Corrosion and Materials Degradation and Coatings, has been elected to the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), USA, as a Senior Member. This award is for Dr. Eliaz’s “success in patents, licensing, and commercialization”, “technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society”, and “contributions to the innovation ecosystem” at Tel-Aviv University, recognizing Prof. Eliaz “as a rising leader and inventor” in his field.

We are pleased to present a Q&A interview with Professor Maryam Tabrizian, Editor-in-Chief of Materials since 2011. 

To encourage academic exchange and communication, we are pleased to announce that the Materials Science First Poster Competition has now commenced. 

Topic: All aspects of Materials Science.

Date: 5 August to 5 September

Submit your poster: https://sciforum.net/conference/PCMS

Requirements:

1. The content of the poster can be a comprehensive presentation of your recent research results or a summary of the cutting-edge research in your field. However, all posters must be related to Materials Science.
2. No copyright issues with any elements in the poster.
3. The minimum size for images is 148 mm × 210 mm (horizontal × vertical) at 300 dpi.
4. Posters should be in gif/jpg/png/jpeg/bmp format and no larger than 4 MB.
5. The poster should be submitted to the system along with a valid link on Twitter about the poster before 5 September.
6. Applicants should be PhD students or researchers with a PhD degree in Materials Science or a related field.

Required Application Documents:

1. A caption with poster title and brief introduction.
2. An updated CV and a scanned copy of the applicant’s doctorate/student certificate.
3. A link corresponding to a relevant tweet about the poster on Twitter.

To register for the poster prize:

1. Register and submit via Sciforum.
2. Tweet about your poster with the title, #MaterialsPoster, and any other relevant subject hashtag(s).
3. Share your poster with as many as people as possible.
4. Discuss and answer questions from the community or committee members.
5. Win a prize if your poster is selected as the best!

Evaluation criteria:

1. Number of thumb up/retweets of each entry by 5 October (20% of the total score)
2. Voting results by poster committee (80% of the total score)

• Originality/Novelty
• Interest to the readers
• Rich in content and coherent
• Significance of content

Prize:

First Prize: 500 CHF and a 50% discount voucher;

Second Prize: 300 CHF and a 30% discount voucher each;

Third Prize: 200 CHF and a 20% discount voucher each;

Note: The voucher can be applied to manuscripts submitted to Materials before 31 August 2021.

The winners will be announced on the Materials website and on Twitter by end of October.

For any questions, please contact [email protected].

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our Open Access agreement with Jisc Collections, which will allow UK institutions to benefit from access to article processing charge (APC) discounts and streamlined payment workflows.

All institutions participating in the agreement will also gain access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information for easy identification and additional transparency.

Eligible authors affiliated with the participating institutions are prompted to choose the corresponding Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system.

About Jisc

Jisc's vision is for the UK to be the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the world. At its heart is the super-fast national research and education network, Janet, with built-in cyber security protection.  Jisc also provides technology solutions for its members (colleges, universities and research centres) and customers (public sector bodies), helps members save time and money by negotiating sector-wide deals and provides advice and practical assistance on digital technology. Jisc is funded by the UK higher and further education and research funding bodies and member institutions.

For more information, contact [email protected]

About MDPI

MDPI is a publisher of fully peer-reviewed, Open Access journals with a focus on thorough and rapid editorial processing. Its aim is to ensure that high-quality research is verified and made available to the research community as quickly as possible. MDPI stands at the forefront of the Open Access movement, having launched its first online journal Molecules in 1996. Today, MDPI is a leader in Open Access publishing with over 250 journals across all research disciplines, and all content published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

For any questions about this agreement, please contact the MDPI IOAP team at [email protected].

MDPI has provided several Free Open Platforms that may help accelerate scientific exchange and provide support to academics during this particularly tough period. Thanks to our brilliant technical support, we are pleased to report that the first Materials webinar on Advances in Materials, Coatings and Corrosion Research is coming soon.

Date: Friday 22 May 2020 | 3 PM CEST/ 11 PM AEST/ 9 AM EDT

Duration: Maximum 1 hour 30 minutes

Webinar ID: 814-2687-4917

Register for Free Here: https://materials-1.sciforum.net/

Chair:

Speakers:

For any questions about the webinar, please send an email to [email protected].

Since 1996, MDPI has been committed to supporting the research community by providing the latest research freely available and making relevant and useful research available as quickly as possible. The world is current experiencing a pandemic of COVID-19, and researchers are working extremely hard to understand it and find a cure.

The values MDPI holds strongly are particularly important at the moment, and we will continue to publish relevant, peer-reviewed research as quickly as possible in open access format. This means that it will immediately be available for researchers, health professionals, and the general public to read, distribute, and reuse. We believe that scientific advancements will be crucial to overcoming this pandemic, and will do everything we can to support researchers working looking for solutions.

COVID-19 Academic Resources Center contains a variety of information related to COVID-19 available from MDPI, including journal articles, special issues, and preprints, among others.

For more information, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/covid-19

As a leading Open Access publisher, MDPI is committed to fostering open scientific exchange in all forms across all disciplines. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, many researchers have to stay at home and many academic conferences have been cancelled or postponed. In light of these changes, MDPI has adopted numerous initiatives that may help accelerate scientific exchange and provide support to the academics during this period.

Scholarly Community—Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia is an online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as providing benchmark information for researchers and the general public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge on specific topics.

Comprehensive and Free Literature Database—Scilit

Scilit is a comprehensive, free database for scientists that uses a new method to collate data and index scientific material. Our crawlers extract the latest data from CrossRef and PubMed on a daily basis. This means that newly published articles are immediately added to Scilit.

Display Academic Achievements—SciProfiles

SciProfiles is an innovative social network for researchers and scholars that is developed by MDPI. In line with our broad mission, the purpose of SciProfiles is to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and providing opportunities for academic networking.

Organize and Participate in Conferences Online—Sciforum

Sciforum is an event planning platform that supports open science by offering the opportunity to host and participate in academic conferences. It provides an environment for scholarly exchange, discussion of topics of current interest, building of networks, and establishing collaborations.

Post Early Versions of Research Outputs—Preprints

Preprints is a platform dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable. We post original research articles and comprehensive reviews, and papers can be updated by authors at any time. Content on Preprints is not peer-reviewed, and feedback can be received from readers.

***

MDPI remains committed to open science and open data and has signed a statement, along with more than thirty scholarly publishers, showing our intention to facilitate sharing of new research findings as early on as possible. The initiative sees publishers collectively removing barriers to new research, in the face of a global healthcare crisis.

The world is currently suffering from a global pandemic of the corona virus COVID-19. MDPI expresses its sympathies for all of those affected by the virus and stands in solidarity with medical staff and researchers treating patients and searching for scientific solutions.

MDPI has previously published papers covering corona viruses in addition to new papers on the current outbreak, see all papers here. In particular, Viruses has published a number of Special Issues and papers on the topic (see here, here, and here) as well as a forthcoming Special Issue.

Alongside journal articles, MDPI has been a strong supporter of preprints, which are increasingly being used to rapidly disseminate the latest research, and we run the preprint server Preprints.org. Our database of research articles, Scilit, is free to use and covers all publishers including preprint servers. New papers are often in search results within hours of publication and users can set up alerts for new papers.

Our main priority during this period has been the health and safety of staff, and we continue to allow staff to work at home and closely monitor the situation in all locations in which we work. Despite the restrictions, we continue to provide a full publication service and, by close collaboration with our editorial boards and making use our in-house teams, ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in publishing vital research. Fast and open publication has always been at the core of MDPI values and is now more important than ever.

We hope that a solution to the current situation will emerge soon. In the meantime, we will do our best to continue communicating vital research in all fields.

The advantages of the open access model of scientific publishing are being increasingly recognized in the scientific community. It allows new scientific evidence to be accessed from the moment of publication for free by anyone around the globe, boosting the impact of new research. In response, many funders, libraries and universities have been adopting new principles to accelerate the transition to open access.

Recently, “transformative agreements” have been negotiated between traditional publishers and various institutions. While increasing the number of open access papers, these agreements lack binding commitments to a full transition to open access, their conditions vary across different regions, and access is still limited for many users.

MDPI is a co-signatory of the recent position statement raising concerns about potential downsides of transformative agreements and how they may delay a full transition to open access. The statement highlights that these models “risk perpetuating current limitations on access, transparency and market competitiveness, while simultaneously facilitating excessive charges on the public purse”.

As a pioneering open access journal publisher, MDPI is the first to promote the importance of science being made available to everyone. Our peer-reviewed journals, covering diverse academic disciplines, are fully accessible to the public free of charge under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). This is why, along with other open access publishers, MDPI is a proud signatory of the position paper and is committed to contributing to the replacement of weak transitional agreements with “agreements with publishers that are already fully committed to open science and who offer full, immediate and transparent Open Access”.

Read the position paper here

We are pleased to announce that Encyclopedia will be awarding five Outstanding Contributor Awards for researchers in 2020. The nominations and applications will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee consisting of senior scholars from the Encyclopedia Editorial Board.

Prize for Winners

1. An official certificate;
2. A cash award of 500 CHF or an MDPI discount voucher of 800 CHF.

Application Deadline

31 December, 2020 (Please send your application email with a list of all entries you contributed to our office before the deadline: [email protected])

Candidate Requirements

1. Have a Ph.D. degree;
2. Have more than three qualified entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020.

Evaluation Standards

1. Number of entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020;
2. Quality of entries online (including length, figure quality, and novelty);
3. Impact of entries (including the number of likes, discussion contents, views, and downloads).

If you are a researcher and have not yet contribute entries to Encyclopedia, please do not miss this chance to highlight your research results.

MDPI will be attending the 17th International Congress on Catalysis, San Diego, California, USA, June 14-19, 2020.

This congress is the premier technical gathering of our communities of practice in surface and organometallic catalysis, industrial homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, and catalysis in condensed media. This meeting brings together participants from academia, industry, and national laboratories, with a tradition and expressed goal of nurturing and mentoring students and young researchers as part of its mission.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Catalysts
• Molecules
• Materials
• Coatings
• Clean Technologies
• Energies
• Inorganics
• Processes

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #408). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://2020icc.com/

MDPI will be attending the CLEO Laser Science to Photonic Applictions, San Jose, California, USA, May 12-14, 2020

Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics to generate quality face-time with world renowned industry leaders and help achieve your annual sales and marketing goals. Special industry offerings make this event a magnet for executives and scientific equipment users throughout the buying channel. Exhibitors will have extensive, targeted opportunities for exposure and in-depth interaction with key prospects and customers. These high-level buyers are looking to you—the leading product experts, manufacturers and service providers—for the most innovative, cost-effective solutions to support their missions.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Applied Sciences (leading journal)
• Photonics (co-leading)
• Electronics
• Fibers
• Materials

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #2607). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.cleoconference.org/home/.

MDPI will be attending the 149th TMS 2020 on minerals, metals, and materials in San Diego, CA, USA, 23–27 February 2020. An Editorial Board Member meeting of Metals will take place during this event. We warmly welcome you join and share your publishing experience with us.

TMS2020 will present more than 85 symposia planned by all five TMS technical divisions and covering a broad range of topics related to minerals, metals, and materials science and engineering. The event will draw more than 4000 attendees and feature four full days of technical programming.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Metals

Coatings

Materials

Applied Sciences

Nanomaterials

Energies

Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing

Entropy

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #726). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.tms.org/TMS2020.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of SciProfiles, its social network platform for researchers and scholars.

The purpose of SciProfiles is aligned with MDPI’s broad mission to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and to serve scholars and communities by providing opportunities for academic networking.

SciProfiles also ambitions to serve as a sustainable, transparent and community-driven research evaluation system aligned with the DORA principles (https://sfdora.org/). Through their scientific profiles, academics can highlight their contribution to research communities, and measure their impact on their field, beyond publication numbers and impact factors. SciProfiles is currently a beta version and will enrich to give researchers the possibility to highlight all of their contributions to science and their scientific communities as authors, reviewers, editors, conference organizers, conference panelists, conference keynote speakers, or even as lecturers or student mentors at their University.

The classic components of popular community social networks, including follower/following, classical metrics, endorsements and recommendations (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1690), comments (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397) are or will be very soon highlighted in SciProfiles as open science contributions.

To help increase the impact and visibility of articles and their authors to an appropriate audience, the platform offers a NewsFeed that includes recommendations of relevant content based on interests, publication history, saved searches or colleagues’ recommendations.

SciProfiles’ avatars are now being integrated on several MDPI platforms, meaning that you will directly access researchers’ profiles from any of the MDPI platforms:

MDPI's journal publishing website: www.mdpi.com
MDPI's conference hosting and management website: www.sciforum.net
MDPI's pre-print website : www.preprints.org
MDPI's knowledge sharing website : www.encyclopedia.pub
MDPI's books store: www.mdpi.com/books
MDPI's literature database : www.scilit.net

SciProfiles aims to serve scientific communities at large. It can be embedded into third-party websites and also welcomes integration of data from third-parties.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/2
Dr. Franck Vazquez: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/FranckVazquez
Dr. Martyn Rittman: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/martynrittman

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to three scholars for their research on developing the lithium-ion battery. Lithium-ion batteries are a cornerstone in moving from fossil-fuelled to rewenable energies. They are used in electric cars, smartphones and other electronic devices.

The original research into lithium-ion batteries was spurred by the oil crisis in the 1970s. Stanley Whittingham laid the foundation for later research on metal oxide cathodes and intercalated lithium ions undertaken by John B. Goodenough and Akira Yoshino.

The Nobel committee in a statement commends the advent of ion-lithium batteries as "the foundation of a wireless, fossil fuel-free society" and "of the greatest benefit to humankind."

We would like to congratulate the Winners on their breakthrough achievement—in particular Professor Goodenough, who authored a review paper on "Advanced Electrodes for High Power Li-ion Batteries" in the MDPI journal Materials in 2013. Please be invited to add your comments on the paper here.

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 MDPI Writing Prize. Entrants were asked to write on the theme "Judging research: How should research and researchers be evaluated and rewarded?" We received a large number of excellent essays from PhD students and postdocs, and the process of shortlisting and choosing winners was not an easy one. The winners demonstrated excellent writing skills alongside interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

As last year, we will begin the process of collating all entries into a book that will be available in open access format. Alongside promoting good writing skills, we see the prize as a way to promote the voices of early career researchers within broader debates and policy discussions.

Congratulations to all of the participants and especially the winners. The winners are:

1st Prize (500 CHF):
Albin Nilsson (National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland)
[Read here]

2nd Prize (250 CHF):
Qi Zhang (Shandong University, Jinan, China)
[Read here]
Igor Ogashawara (Indiana University, Indianapolis, US)
[Read here]

3rd Prize (100 CHF):
Margaret Sivapragasam (Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Perak, Malaysia)
[Read here]
Arvind Sharma (The University of Queensland, Gatton, Australia)
[Read here]
Jose Flores-Guerrero (University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands)
[Read here]

The MDPI Writing Prize is an annual award supported by MDPI Author Services, which provides services including language editing, reformatting, plagiarism checks, and image editing.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of a new functionality giving the possibility for researchers and scholars to endorse, and formally recommend articles to their colleagues.

MDPI was an early signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/read/) which calls for improvement in how quality and impact of scholarly research outputs are evaluated, especially in moving beyond journal-based citation metrics (journal Impact Factor, Scopus Citescore, etc.).

MDPI supports the establishment of article-level impact metrics, including citations, views, downloads, and Altmetric scores. These measures serve as an impact indicator for research articles on a case–by-case basis, assessing paper on its own merit. However, these metrics are also subjective and can give a biased picture of the article impact: they do not directly reflect the quality or the intrinsic scientific value of the article.

In our view, community engagement with publications based on community-driven metrics can help to overcome this limitation. We have therefore launched an option for scholars to endorse articles, indicating their own assessment of its content and making a recommendation to their community. This follows our implementation of the open source Hypothesis commenting tool, which has been available for all articles published by MDPI for over a year (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397). Both endorsement and commenting are available for all previously published and forthcoming MDPI articles.

In addition to potentially serving as a sustainable solution to article assessment, endorsements will help scientific communities to identify the most relevant articles, independently of the journal in which it was published.

The code for the endorsing functionality, which relies on DOIs and ORCIDs, will be made available on GitHub with an open source license.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, President and Founder
Dr. Franck Vazquez, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Martyn Rittman, Publishing Director

Encyclopedia is a free online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as provide a comprehensive record of scientific development. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to contact us via [email protected].

Materials (ISSN 1996-1944), MDPI's open-access materials science and engineering journal, has published more than 10,000 papers since its inception in 2008. Materials is now covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science), Scopus, Ei Compendex, and PubMed, with a 2018 Impact Factor of 2.97, which corresponds to rank 102/293 (Q2) in the JCR category “Materials Science, Multidisciplinary”. The Citescore is 3.26, which equals rank 97/439 (Q1) in 'General Materials Science' according to Scopus data.

Our sincere thanks go to the Editor-in-Chief of Materials, Prof. Dr. Maryam Tabrizian, and all the Editorial Board members, as well as Guest Editors of Special Issues, who have ensured the continued success of the journal through their hard work and diligence.

We are pleased to announce that Preprints has passed the milestone of 10,000 posted preprints. We are delighted to have reached this after just over three years of operation. Our congratulations and thanks go to our authors and advisory board who have supported growth of the platform and been crucial to its operation.

You can find further details at https://www.preprints.org/announcement/show/37.

Last week, the DeepGreen initiative in Germany started into an advanced test phase with the publishing partners S. Karger AG, SAGE Publishing, MDPI, Frontiers and De Gruyter, as well as 27 universities from all over Germany, from Hamburg University of Applied Sciences to University of Konstanz.

DeepGreen aims at lowering the barriers for open access publishing by automatically delivering metadata and full text publications from participating publishers to authorized repositories at German universities.

In preparation for a later live operation, the advanced test phase serves to gain experience with extensive data deliveries from publishers and also handling different repository software (including OPUS4, DSpace, EPrints, MyCoRe). DeepGreen thereby acts as a sophisticated platform, receiving articles published by authors affiliated with German universities and depositing these articles to respective university repositories, based on the affiliation metadata. For more information about DeepGreen: https://deepgreen.kobv.de

Karger AG has been a close cooperation partner of the DeepGreen consortium since 2016. S. Karger has more than 80 subscription-based and around 20 open access journals covering a wide spectrum in health science. DeepGreen will assign S. Karger articles to authorized institutions on the legal basis of German alliance and national licenses.

SAGE Publishing  was founded by Sara Miller McCune in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1,000 journals and over 600 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. SAGE Publishing has been a close cooperation partner of DeepGreen since 2016.

MDPI  is a scientific open access publisher and has been a partner of DeepGreen since 2017. MDPI comprises 205 peer-reviewed journals of various disciplines. All articles are published under a CC-BY license and are freely available without embargo period.

Frontiers  is a scientific open access publisher with 61 journals of over 600 academic disciplines. All articles are peer-reviewed and published freely available under CC-BY license.

De Gruyter  is an academic publisher with more than 700 subscription-based and open access journals of 29 disciplines. Articles provided by De Gruyter will be assigned to institutions with German alliance and national licenses.

There is promising communication with other publishers.

DeepGreen is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the consortium comprises six institutions: the Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg, Bavarian State Library, Bavarian Library Network, University Library of the Technische Universität Berlin, University Library of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Helmholtz Open Science Coordination Office at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

The University of Basel and the MDPI Sustainability Foundation are organizing the First Basel Sustainable Publishing Forum on 9th September 2019.

The aim of this event is to provide background and perspectives on Plan S to Learned Societies, which have to make well-informed decisions to transition their journals to Open Access (OA).

The BSPF will bring together several representatives of Learned societies, Plan S architects as well as representatives from various publishers and publishing platforms. After getting the big picture from cOAlition S, panel discussions will allow to better understand the diverse challenges that Learned societies are facing to transition their journals to OA as well as to identify sustainable, implementable and scalable solutions for successful Open Access transition.

For program details and registration, please follow the link below:
https://sciforum.net/conference/SustainableSolutionsToOpenAccess

We will be attending the 32nd European Crystallographic Meeting (ECM32), to be held in the High-Renaissance main building of the University of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria, 18–23 August 2019. ECM32 is organized by the European Crystallographic Association (ECA) as a collaboration between the University of Vienna and the Technical University at Vienna. ECM32 is setting up an attractive program covering the latest advances in crystallography and related sciences to attract young and senior scientists, as well as companies and the general public. Representatives from the following open-access journals will be attending:

Crystals

Minerals

Symmetry

Nanomaterials

Materials

Magnetochemistry

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (booth #D12). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit https://www.ecm2019.org/home/.

We are pleased to inform that Materials received an updated Journal Impact Factor of 2.972 in the recent release of the Journal Citation Reports®. The journal's 5-Year Impact Factor is 3.532. Materials now ranks 102/293 (Q2) in the category 'Materials Science, Multidisciplinary.'

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Materials:

Source: data according to Journal Citation Reports®, 2018 release, a Clarivate Analytics product; and Scopus journal metrics.

MDPI will be attending the European Congress and Exhibition on Advanced Materials and Processes (EUROMAT 2019) in Stockholm, Sweden on 1–5 September 2019.

EUROMAT is the premier international congress in the field of materials science and technology in Europe. The visions of EUROMAT2019 are to:

• Facilitate a programme where academia, research institutes and industry can meet and exchange ideas and provide information on the latest scientific development in
• Promote involvement of top universities and researchers in materials science including special contribution from large scale facilities like MAXIV in Lund
• Demonstrate efficient knowledge transfer between research and its application through the active involvement of research institutes in Sweden like RISE and Swerea

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Materials
Metals
Catalysts
Nanomaterials
Processes
Polymers
Molecules
JFB
Sustainability
Coatings
Inorganics

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#BrB1) in Norra Latin - The Marble Vault. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://euromat2019.fems.eu/.

MDPI will be attending the 45th International Conference on Micro & Nano Engineering (MNE 2019), to be held in Rhodes Island, Greece, 23 - 26 September 2019.

MNE is the core international conference focusing on: micro/ nanofabrication and manufacturing techniques, and application of the fabricated micro/nanostructures, devices and microsystems into electronics, photonics, energy, environment, chemistry and life sciences.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Nanomaterials

Micromachines

Safety

Coatings

Biosensors

Applied Sciences

Chemosensors

Electronics

Energies

Materials

Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #3). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.cleoeurope.org/.

We will be attending the The 21st European Symposium on Organic Chemistry. Since its first edition in 1979, the biannual ESOC conference has developed into the flagship event for the Organic Chemistry community in Europe and beyond. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Molecules
Chemistry
Molbank
Marine Drugs
Polymers
Coatings
Catalysts
Materials
Processes

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #25). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://esoc2019.conf.tuwien.ac.at/welcome/.

MDPI will be attending the 22^nd International Conference on Composites Materials (ICCM 22) in Melbourne, Australia on 11–16 August 2019.

ICCM is the premier international conference in the field of composite materials, and covers polymer matrix composites, metal matrix composites, ceramic matrix composites, natural fibre composites, fibre metal laminates, fibres and resins and all the other classes of composites.

The conference theme for the ICCM 22 is “Advanced Composites: Research to Impact”, with the objective of exploring the latest research into composite materials and how they will be used in the future covering multiple applications including aerospace, construction, wind energy, automotive, electronics and so on.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Aerospace
• Ceramics
• Fibers
• Materials
• Metals

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#08). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://iccm22.com/.

MDPI will be attending the CLEO/Europe-EQEC 2019, to be held in Munich, Germany, 23–27 June 2019.

CLEO/Europe-EQEC 2019 will be offering an expanded short course programme covering a wide range of exciting topics in photonics and laser technology. Short courses participants are generally targeted individuals who wish to learn about a topic outside their main area of expertise. They are intended for engineers and scientists.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Applied Sciences
• Materials
• Fibers
• Photonics

People rely on optics every day. By utilizing the knowledge of how light behaves under different conditions, scientists and engineers develop remarkable technologies that improve our world. In expanding our offerings to the field of optics, MDPI will be launching a broad-interest and high-quality journal, Optics, an open access journal that seeks full research articles in all areas of optics and related interdisciplinary areas. Optics will also act as a medium for exchanging ideas and thoughts regarding the impacts of optical research.

Optics is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal which aims to present cutting edge research related to all aspects of optics. We are now seeking a founding Editor-in-Chief to develop Optics into a leading flagship journal in this field.

The main responsibilities of the Editor-in-Chief include the following:

• Setting the scope and direction of the journal;
• Advising on the strategic development of the journal;
• Ensuring the quality of the published content;
• Coordinating the Editorial Board and stimulating their contributions to the journal;
• Promoting the journal at scientific conferences and through other venues.

We also welcome scientists in the field of optics to join our Editorial Board.

A full application for evaluation should include these items:

• An up-to-date CV;
• A description of the candidate’s vision for Optics.

Applications are due by 20 June 2019. Please send your application or any questions to the Optics Editorial Office ([email protected]).

As the signature event in the burgeoning solar power technology and market sector, the PVSCs have a rich tradition of bringing together students, innovators, researchers and PV leaders in a vibrant and highly integrative forum to share information, gain knowledge, strengthen collaborations and move forward photovoltaic science and technology from basic and applied research into large scale manufacturing and deployments.

Our representatives will be exhibiting our open access journals Energies, Coatings, Sustainability, Catalysts, Nanomaterials, Materials, Electronics, and Applied System Innovation (ASI).

If you will also be in attendance, please stop by our booth (# 110). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have regarding open access publishing or our journals. For more information about this conference, please visit https://www.ieee-pvsc.org/PVSC46/index.php.

We will be attending the 46th Controlled Release Society Annual Meeting & Exposition. It is one of the biggest events in pharmaceutical field. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Pharmaceutics
JCM
Biomolecules
Materials
IJMS
Molecules
Nanomaterials
Pharmaceuticals
Scientia Pharmaceutica
Vaccines
JPM
Genes
JFB
IJERPH
Biomedicines
Healthcare

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #303). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://2019.controlledreleasesociety.org/

In December 2018, the Portuguese Society of Materials (SPM) chose to become affiliated to Materials and Metals. As part of this collaboration, all members of the society enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) when submitting articles to Materials and Metals.

The Portuguese Society of Materials (SPM) is an association of technical and scientific nature, nonprofit, endowed with legal personality and is governed by its own statutes and general regulations. SPM wants to disseminate around the world what is best made in Portugal regarding Science and Technology of Materials. They work to create a network of contacts worldwide to provide exchange of experiences and knowledge.

SPM works to help introducing new concepts for the use of Materials which are economically attractive and sustainable for future generations. They believe that knowledge is the key.

They work to encourage the active participation of all members of the community of Materials, and strengthen the link between universities, research centers, business and industry, and thereby add value and open new opportunities.

SPM is a professional organization whose functions are highly relevant to the scope of Materials and Metals. We look forward to collaborating with SPM and publishing state-of-the-art research from its members in this field.

MDPI will be attending the 26th meeting of the North American Catalysis Society (NAM 26), to be held in Chicago, USA, 23-28 June 2019.

The 26th meeting of the North American Catalysis Society, NAM26, is the premier scientific event in the field of catalysis research and development in 2019. It will feature technological challenges, breakthrough discoveries, and state-of-the art academic and industrial research.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Catalysts
• Materials
• Energies
• Processes
• Molecules
• Inorganics
• Nanomaterials

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #108). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://isen.northwestern.edu/nam262019-north-american-catalysis-society-meeting

We are pleased to welcome more universities from Poland, Italy, Germany, Brazil and other parts of the world to MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). A warm welcome to the institutions listed below, who have joined the Program in February and March this year.

Authors affiliated with these institutions can now enjoy a discount on the APC for papers accepted for publication in any MDPI journal. If you would like to learn more about our program, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap or email us at [email protected].

We will be attending the ACS 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. It is an interdisciplinary forum open to anyone with an interest in chemistry and related disciplines. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Biomolecules
Catalysts
Diagnostics
Fibers
Inorganics
Materials
Membranes
Micromachines
Molbank
Molecules
Pharmaceuticals
Processes

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #1123). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/meetings/national-meeting.html

We are delighted to announce our participation in Jisc’s Publication Router project, as of March 2019.

Publications Router is a Jisc service that automatically sends notifications about research articles to institutions' systems such as their repositories or CRISs, since May 2015. Through this agreement, MDPI will provide Jisc with daily feeds and information regarding published articles, which will be gathered by their system and delivered to institutions also registered to this service. Nearly all of our articles are published within 15 days of acceptance, so institutions will receive them quite promptly.

The feed will include the full text of the published version of record, with no embargo, so the articles can be exposed immediately for public view. They are accompanied by rich metadata, including confirmation of the immediate CC BY licence, minimising the need for any manual intervention or checking.

For more information about Publications Router, you may contact Jisc’s central helpdesk at [email protected]. For any queries about MDPI’s institutional agreements and collaborations, you may get in touch with MDPI’s Institutional Engagement team at [email protected], which would be very happy to hear from further UK institutions.

Rigorous peer-review is the cornerstone of high quality academic publishing. Over 97,000 scholars served as reviewers for MDPI journals in 2018. We are extremely appreciative of all those who made a contribution to the editorial process in this capacity. At the beginning of every year, journal editorial offices publish a list all reviewers’ names to express our gratitude. In addition, this year the “MDPI Top Reviewer Awards” are announced, to recognize the very best reviewers for their expertise, dedication, high quality, and timely review reports. We are pleased to announce the following winners of the 2018 MDPI Top Reviewer Awards:

• Ali Behnood
• Andrea Pezzuolo
• Angela Gorgoglione
• Anna D'Auria
• Antonio D'Andrea
• Azhar Abbas
• Bogdan Zagajewski
• Chunhui Chen
• Dominika Głąbska
• Dominika Guzek
• Dragan Pamucar
• Francisco J. G. Silva
• Frank Li
• Gianluca Serafini
• Gyorgy Szekely
• Haozhi Pan
• Helvi Heinonen-Tanski
• José Manuel Gómez-Soberón
• Kathy Lewis
• Klara Kosova
• Luis N. López De Lacalle
• M. Z. Naser
• Malwina Tytła
• Masoume Amirkhani
• Matteo Ghidelli
• Moretti Laura
• Petra Schneider
• Roberto Cerchione
• Spyros Papaefthymiou
• Ştefan Cristian Gherghina

Since 2010, MDPI has run its own online submission system. More recently, we have made the software, with accompanying publishing services, available to other publishers as JAMS (Journal and Article Management System). We are now delighted to announce the launch of JAMS Journals, a standardized platform for operating open access journals at low cost.

JAMS Journals provides a comprehensive service, including a shared submission website, journal websites hosted at a URL provided by the publisher, and a full production service. There is a small setup fee and the cost for each published paper is just a few hundred Swiss francs.

The platform demonstrates that running an open access journal can be straightforward and affordable. The JAMS Journals platform is suitable for

• small publishers or groups of scholars looking to launch their own journal;
• existing publishers or societies seeking to explore open access options;
• publishers looking to convert an existing subscription journal to open access.

JAMS journals launches with two journals from Canadian-based publisher Etcetera Publications:

• Canadian Journal of Pesticides & Pest Management (http://www.cjppm.ca)
• Nanotechnology in Agriculture, Food & Environment (http://www.nanoafe.ca)

Dr AJ Al-Rajab (President of Etcetera Publications) comments:

“In the past few months, we were working on our project to launch new open access scientific journals in the field of agricultural and environmental sciences. We decided to go with JAMS for this venture because of the high quality of their services, reasonable prices, professionalism and easy communication. Our portfolio is expected to grow rapidly during 2019 to include more titles covering different areas in agriculture and environment. MDPI earned already our complete satisfaction and we are looking for a long term cooperation.”

Alongside the new platform, we continue to provide flexible, tailored journal management solutions for existing publishers. For any questions or to request a quotation, contact Dr. Constanze Schelhorn ([email protected]).

2018 was a great year for preprints, with increasing numbers of authors looking to make their papers available online before peer review. Along with other preprint servers, our platform Preprints.org  saw an increase in the uptake from authors, and more than double the number of announced papers compared to 2017. In fact, we recently passed two important milestones: 8000 preprints online and 30,000 authors. 

We believe that the whole research community has the opportunity to benefit from work being available online as early as possible. We thank and congratulate our authors for supporting us to make this goal a reality.

In 2019, we will be looking carefully at how to provide better value for authors, maintain efficiency while growing in size, and make sure we remain well-connected with the research community. 

If you want to participate, you can consider screening preprints or joining our advisory board. And, of course, posting your own work.

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our national Open Access agreement with the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Through this national agreement, the Austrian institutions listed below as well as FWF will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by eligible corresponding or funded authors in MDPI journals as long as central funds are available.

All participating institutions have gained access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Funder and Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency. At the same time eligible authors are benefited from an APC discount which comes at no cost for the institutions.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with the participating institutions are prompted to choose the corresponding Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email address. To claim their discount, FWF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript. The institutions will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Eligible authors that have their APC covered by their institution or funder are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "Open Access Funding by the [name of the institution/funder]".

The full text of the agreement is openly available online at: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2536007

For any questions about the agreement, please contact the KEMÖ Consortium at [email protected], FWF at [email protected], or the MDPI IOAP team at [email protected]

The Austrian institutions participating in this agreement are:

• Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
• University for Continuing Education Krems
• University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna
• University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien
• Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
• Institute of Science and Technology Austria
• MCI Management Center Innsbruck
• University of Graz
• University of Linz
• University of Salzburg
• Graz University of Technology
• TU Wien
• University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna
• University of Vienna

This is our first collective agreement with a national library consortium, while the individual institutions around the world participating in our IOAP are now more than 500 - see details here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap. We would be mostly interested in discussing about possible collaborations with other consortia, funders, and institutions in our mutual efforts to accelerate Open Access.

We are pleased to announce the new platform Encyclopedia, which is an online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as providing benchmark information for researchers and the general public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge on specific topics.

We encourage authors of review articles to quote and adapt the content of their published papers to create Encyclopedia entries. You can create completely new entries on topics in which you have knowledge and expertise. There is no limit on the topics or research fields. All of science and the humanities are included. Each entry will be published directly after submission.

We also have prepared a DOI application function in Encyclopedia. Once a DOI application is approved, the entry website will announce the DOI number and a pdf version with DOI information will be automatically created.

We look forward to your contributions and hope you will make use of this service. Find more about the service at: https://encyclopedia.pub/

Our colleagues and editors will be attending the TMS 2019 Annual Meeting and Exhibition, to be held in San Antonio, TX, USA, 10–14 March 2019. The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Metals

Materials

Coatings

Applied Sciences

Nanomaterials

Micromachines

Journal of Composites Science

Energies

QuBS

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#137). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions you may have.

We are delighted to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now a participant of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). Authors funded by the BMGF can enjoy discounts on the APC, while the funder covers the costs of eligible articles centrally. BMGF also has access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency.

We hope that funded authors find the programme beneficial and we are happy to offer our IOAP to other funders that need a streamlined workflow of compliance checking and APC coverage. 

To claim their discount, BMGF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript.

For any questions about the BMGF agreement, please contact the funder at [email protected] or the MDPI IOAP team at [email protected].

Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.

We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.

MDPI will be represented at IMECE 2018 in Pittsburgh, USA, from 9–15 November 2018.

ASME's International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) is the largest interdisciplinary mechanical engineering conference in the world. IMECE plays a significant role in stimulating innovation from basic discovery to translational application. It fosters new collaborations that engage stakeholders and partners not only from academia, but also from national laboratories, industry, research settings, and funding bodies.

The following MDPI open access journals will be represented:

• Energies
• Safety
• Technologies
• Materials
• Lubricants 
• Machines
• Nanomaterials
• IJTPP
• Designs
• Fluids

If you are planning to attend this conference, please stop by our booth #202. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person, and will be happy to answer any questions you may have regarding open access publishing or our journals. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.asme.org/events/imece

MDPI will be attending 2018 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit, to be held in Boston, USA, 25–30 November 2018.

This conference is the key forum to present research to an interdisciplinary and international audience. It provides a window on the future of materials science and offers an opportunity for researchers—from students and postdoctoral fellows, to Nobel and Kavli Prize Laureates—to exchange technical information and network with colleagues.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Materials
• Polymers
• Energies
• Nanomaterials
• Metals
• Journal of Functional Biomaterials (JFB)
• Processes
• Sensors
• Sustainability
• C
• Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing (JMMP)
• Biomimetics
• Methods and Protocols (MPs)

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #123). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.mrs.org/fall2018

We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".

For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at [email protected].

Our editorial team will be attending the XXVI Ibero-American Catalysis Congress (CICat 2018) in Coimbra, Portugal, 9–14 September 2018

As a result of the biannual meetings held since 1968, the Ibero-American Federation of Catalysis Societies (FISoCat), the Portuguese Society of Chemistry (SPQ) and the University of Coimbra, have the pleasure of organizing the XXVI Ibero-American Catalysis Congress (CICat 2018).

As in previous editions, this event aims to be a meeting point for the Ibero-American community working in Catalysis and in all its different areas of scientific knowledge. The 2018 CICat has a symbolic historical importance, for reaching 50 years since the beginning of this series of Encounters. Participants of CICat 2018 are also invited to visit the city of Coimbra, as well as its historic center and the University of Coimbra (UNESCO World Heritage Site).

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Catalysts
Processes
Energies
Symmetry
Applied Sciences
Sustainability
Materials

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth near the Lobby Coffee Break). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://cicat2018.eventos.chemistry.pt/?setLn=es.

We are pleased to inform that Materials received an updated Journal Impact Factor of 2.467 in the June 2018 release of the Journal Citation Reports®. The journal's 5-Year Impact Factor is 3.325. Materials now ranks 111/285 (Q2) in the category 'Materials Science, Multidisciplinary.'

Overview of Citation Metrics:

• Journal Impact Factor, 2 yrs (2017): 2.467
• 5-Year Impact Factor (2017): 3.325
• CiteScore, 3 yrs (Scopus): 3.02
• SJR Scimago Journal Rank 2017 (SJR): 0.732
• Source Normalized Impact 2017 (SNIP): 1.285

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Materials:

MDPI will be attending the 8th Tokyo Conference on Advanced Catalytic Science and Technology (TOCAT8), to be held in Yokohama, Japan, 5–10 August 2018.

Catalysis Society of Japan will organize this meeting as a continuation of TOCAT (1990), TOCAT2 (1994), TOCAT3 (1998), TOCAT4 (2002), TOCAT5 (2006), TOCAT6/APCAT5 (2010), and TOCAT7 (2014). The past seven TOCAT conferences have earned a good reputation as a new series of international conferences on catalysis that has significantly filled the gap between research and technology in catalysis. Stimulating closer ties between academia and industry and encouraging young researchers in the field of catalysis are the central concept of this conference. This conference should greatly contribute to exchanging new ideas and technologies and promoting developments of new outstanding catalysts and systems under the scope that catalysis is a highly and eagerly demanded technology in industries and for sustainable society and drives innovation in many other fields.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Catalysts
Processes
Energies
Molecules
Materials

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #8). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.shokubai.org/tocat8/index.html.

All the accepted Eurosensors 2018 submissions will also be published in open access form in the MDPI journal Proceedings. For the publications from Eurosensors 2017, please visit at: https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/1/4

Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Sensors
Chemosensors
Biosensors
Actuators
Materials

We are pleased to report Materials received a CiteScore of 3.02 for 2017. The metric reflects citation activity in 2017 in Scopus for papers published in the period 2014‒2016.

For the full details in the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile. To check the full list of MDPI journals receiving CiteScores, please see here.

The 2017 CiteScore™ data is available now, based on citation data in the Scopus® database. The current CiteScore reflects citation activity in 2017 for articles published in 2014‒2016. Please note that the list below includes journals assigned a CiteScore in this year’s release. For a full list of journals indexed in Scopus, please see our journal list.

Thirteen of our journals received a CiteScore which is in the top 10% of the distribution in at least one of the categories (marked with * in the table below), while a further 32 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

Unlike CiteScores and the widely used Journal Impact Factors, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metrics are normalized in order to correct for differences in citation practices between scientific fields. Therefore, the SNIP allows direct comparison between journals specialized in different fields.

According to 2017 data, MDPI publishes six journals with an average citation impact, or SNIP, in excess of 1.500. These journals are Biomolecules, Cancers, Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM), Marine Drugs, Remote Sensing and Sensors (see the last column in the table below).

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

MDPI will be attending the 69th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Electrochemistry, to be held in Bologna, Italy, 2–7 September 2018.

To mark the continuity between academic culture and technological progress, the scientific theme of the meeting is Electrochemistry from Knowledge to Innovation. Fundamental aspects of analytical, molecular, physical and bioelectrochemistry will be discussed, as well as their applications to (nano)materials science, energy, environment and biomedicine.

The following MDPI journals will be represented at the Meeting:

• Coatings
• Metals
• Applied Science
• Catalysts
• Materials
• Chemosensors
• Biosensors

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #9). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://annual69.ise-online.org/.

In April 2018, the Spanish Manufacturing Engineering Society (MES) chose Materials its first-choice journal and became an affiliated society member of the journal.

As part of this collaboration, all affiliated MES members enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) when submitting articles to Materials. The Manufacturing Engineering Society (MES) is an association comprising most of the academics working on manufacturing-related topics within the universities in Spain, and organizations and professionals interested in promoting knowledge and research on manufacturing-related topics.

We are pleased to announce the results of the first MDPI Writing Prize. We received a large number of entries from across the globe on the theme of “The Global Benefits of Open Research”. It was a pleasure to read so many original, well-researched and well-presented ideas, and the final choice was not an easy one. We are pleased to announce that the winners are as follows:

1st prize (500 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Edmond Sanganyado, Shantou University, China

2nd prizes (250 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Kamala T. Rajahgopal, Asia e University, Malaysia
Yin Zhixuan, Qingdao University of Technology, China

3rd prizes (100 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Alexandra Ticea, Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania
Ankur Sarker, University of Virginia, USA
Daniel Attoye, United Arab Emirates University, UAE

Congratulations to all of them! The winning entries can be downloaded by clicking on the names above. A compilation of all entries will soon be available as an open access book.

The writing prize is sponsored by the MDPI English editing service.

At MDPI, we always want to keep you up to date. Even for already published articles, some corrections or minor changes may occur. To prevent you from missing any updates, from now on you will be able to access the latest version of any manuscript by clicking on the “check for updates” logo that you can find in the PDF file, even if you have saved the file on your computer.

We are proud to announce that MDPI is now a member of UKSG, the UK´s largest scholarly communications community. Through UKSG, different stakeholders share their knowledge and experience in order to improve the knowledge and information environment for researchers. UKSG´s members include universities, publishers, content providers, intermediaries, and other similar organisations. Members participate in discussions and events on issues around scholarly communications.

The UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition is a flagship initiative from the UKSG and one of the most stimulating events in the scholarly communications calendar. It is held annually and attracts a large number of delegates. More information is available at https://www.uksg.org/events/annualconference

MDPI is delighted to be a part of this active community and we look forward to making our own contribution. We will continue to support organisations and initiatives that boost collaboration and vision within scholarly communication.

More information about UKSG can be found at https://www.uksg.org/. The full membership list is available at: https://www.uksg.org/members.

MDPI will be attending the 2018 E-MRS Spring Meeting and Exhibit. The conference is a plenary session to provide an international forum for discussing recent advances in the field of materials science. It will consist of 29 parallel symposia with invited speakers, oral and poster presentations. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Applied Sciences
Biomimetics
Clean Technologies
Coatings
Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing (JMMP)
Materials
Metals
Nanomaterials
Polymers
Processes
Quantum Beam Science (QuBS)

MDPI will be represented at the EUBCE 2018 which will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, 14-18 May, 2018.

As the leading platform for the collection, exchange and dissemination of scientific and industrial know-how in the field of biomass, the EUBCE combines one of the largest biomass science and technology conferences with a high quality industry exhibition, attracting biomass professionals from around the globe. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Energies
Catalysts
Resources
Materials
ChemEngineering

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #H3). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have regarding open access publishing or our journals. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.eubce.com/

We will be attending the 20th annual Nanotech 2018 Conference & Expo (NANOTECH 2018), co-located with the TechConnect World Innovation Conference, Defense TechConnect Summit and Spring SBIR/STTR Conference. The event will attract more than 350 featured exhibitors and an expected crowd of more than 4000 attendees, including business executives, venture capitalists, politicians, s cientists and researchers from over 70 countries. Nanotech contains 38 symposiums and brings together specialists from a wide range of scientific fields, technology and business.

Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Sensors
Materials
Nanomaterials
Journal of Functional Biomaterials (JFB)
Journal of Imaging
Sustainability
Fluids
Photonics
Electronics
Catalysts
Applied Sciences
Inventions
Diagnostics
Cancers
Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications (JLPEA)
Designs
Pharmaceuticals
C
Inorganics
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH)
Machines
Pharmaceutics
Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing (JMMP)
Actuators
Robotics
Energies
Biosensors
Chemosensors
Membranes
Coatings
Micromachines

If you will also attend this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth # 317). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit:

https://www.techconnectworld.com/Nanotech2018/

Conference Location:
Anaheim Convention Center,
800 W Katella Avenue
Anaheim CA 92802
USA

The DORA initiative addresses the need for advanced approaches in the evaluation and measurement of the quality of scientific research outputs. It is a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines. MDPI proudly joins a list of more than 400 organizations around the world which support DORA’s recommendations for improving the way the quality of research results is evaluated.

More info can be found at http://www.ascb.org/dora/

We will be attending the 255th ACS National Meeting & Exposition. It is an interdisciplinary forum open to anyone with an interest in Chemistry and the related disciplines. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Agronomy
Applied Sciences
Beverages
Biomimetics
Biosensors
C
Catalysts
ChemEngineering
Chemosensors
Coatings
Energies
Environments
Fibers
Foods
Gels
Inorganics
Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (JMSE)
Lubricants
Materials
Mathematics
Metals
Molecules
Nanomaterials
Polymers
Processes
Resources
Safety
Sensors
Separations
Sustainability
Symmetry
Toxins
Water

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #640). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/meetings/national-meeting.html?sc=home_meetings_170818_mtg_NO18_od

We will be attending the 2018 MRS Spring Meeting, which will be held in Phoenix, AZ, USA, 2 to 6 April 2018, representing the following open access journals:

Materials
Metals
Nanomaterials
Polymers
Coatings
Journal of Functional Biomaterials (JFB)
Quantum Beam Science (QuBS)
Biomimetics

Please come along to our booth to chat with our delegates about our journals. Our delegates will also answer any questions about online publishing and our journals. We look forward to meeting you in person in Phoenix!

For more information on the conference, please visit:
http://www.mrs.org/spring2018

Sensors are vital components of smart manufacturing, artificial Intelligence, Cyber–Physical System (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) for industry 4.0. For more advanced creations, biologists, engineers, physicists and chemists are all endeavoring to provide innovative technical sensors. In 2018, the journal Sensors is going to hold an international conference in Kenting, which is located in the south of Taiwan; the conference is taking place in Asia for the first time.

I3S embraces all professionals from industry, academia and government to discuss the latest developments and breakthroughs of sensor technology and related subjects. During the conference, attendees, from a range of research areas, will all gather together to share different aspects and establish new mutually beneficial collaborations across different fields.

Conference scope: Physical Sensors; Sensor Networks; Sensors Application; Biosensors; Chemical Sensors; IOT sensor and application.

We sincerely look forward to your participation in I3S2018.

The competition is still open until end of March! Please check out the banner for more details: https://res.mdpi.com/data/english-prize.pdf

We are delighted to announce that UCL Press has adopted MDPI's Journal Article & Management System, JAMS, including production services. JAMS is a modular, integrated editorial platform for academic publishers. It offers flexibility, ease-of-use, and is a fully integrated solution for the end-to-end management of scholarly journals. JAMS is based on the software used to publish MDPI’s portfolio of journals. 

Ian Caswell, UCL Press Journals Manager, says he is "excited to see UCL Press and MDPI partner together to implement the JAMS submission system for all UCL Press journals. The system offered a flexible, efficient and straightforward solution for our processes from author submission to ready for publication. I am grateful for the valuable experience and support MDPI have offered and look forward to developing our programme with an effective submission system in place.” Dr Martyn Rittman, MDPI’s Publishing Services Manager, adds, “We are proud to support one of the UK’s premier university presses in their publishing operation. This is an excellent way for us at MDPI to share our experience and knowledge, and benefit the research community beyond our own journals.”

JAMS combines services that are kept separate for many publishers. The entire editorial process, production and invoicing (e.g. for open access article processing charges) are fully integrated into a single platform. This allows for efficient, fast manuscript processing. For further information about JAMS, see https://www.mdpi.com/publishing_services. 

We will be attending the 147th TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition, which will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, March 11–15, 2018, representing the following open access journals:

Metals
Materials
Coatings
Applied Sciences
Energies
Minerals
Fibers
JFB

Please come along to our booth (#322) to talk with our delegates about online publishing and our journals. We look forward to meeting you in person in Phoenix!

For more information on the conference, please visit:
http://www.tms.org/tms2018

We are pleased to welcome new participants to MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP), designed to help institutions manage the transition to the Open Access publishing model. Researchers affiliated with participating universites benefit from a 10% discount on the Article Processing Charges (APC) for any paper published in an MDPI journal, while the participating library or university incurs no basic fee for participating in the program.

• No fee for participants and no obligation to prolong after the initial 12 months. The participants may withdraw from the programme at any time, and we will also keep it free for the library for as long as they continue in the programme.
• Authors affiliated with the university will receive a 10% discount on the APC.
• The institution is granted free access to the MDPI submission system and can receive free alerts of new submissions to our journals.
• By default, authors from the institution will continue to be invoiced directly unless the institution opts for central billing.
• Auto-archiving of papers into the institutions´ repository as long as it supports SWORD 1.3.

More details about the programme and a list of our current participant institutions can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap

Institutions which are interested to participate may do so online at: https://www.mdpi.com/ioap-form

The following North American universities have signed up to the IOAP program recently:

Connecticut College, USA
Emory University, USA
Florida International University, USA
Johns Hopkins University, USA
Mississippi State University, USA
Northeastern University, USA
Rice University, USA
University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada
University of Rhode Island, USA
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA
University of Toronto, Canada
University of Windsor, Canada
University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Wellesley College, USA
West Virginia University, USA

Many prestigious institutions from Europe and Asia have joined as well:

Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation, Malaysia
Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Gdansk University of Technology, Poland
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan
Newcastle University, UK
Northumbria University, UK
Southwest University, China
Technical University of Crete, Greece
University Malaya, Malaysia
University of Antwerp, Belgium
University of Cyprus, Cyprus
University of Manchester, UK
University of Reading, UK
University of Sussex, UK
University of Warwick, UK
West Pomeranian University of Technology Szczecin, Poland

We offer a warm welcome to the new participants!

In order to reward the academic community, especially young researchers, and enhance communication among scientists, MDPI journals regularly offer various awards to researchers in specific fields, for example, Young Investigator Awards, Travel Awards, Best Paper Awards, and Best Poster Awards, etc. The awardees range from PhD students to junior scientists.

Currently, the following 44 awards given by MDPI journals are accepting applications. Please click on the award title below to check whether you are eligible for it and start the application process.

The Jussieu Call aims to develop and implement alternative models to meet the aims of open science while promoting bibliodiversity. In particular it wishes to promote new business models for funding open access publication. It was drafted on the Jussieu campus in Paris by a group of French researchers and scientific publishing professionals.

MDPI supports scholarly communities and initiatives that innovate and further promote Open Access publishing. There is a need to explore different frameworks to fund open access in ways that ensure that excessive funds are not diverted from research towards publishing. Many fair funding models already exist, and they can be further developed and extended. These include institutional support, library contributions or subsidies, premium services, participatory funding, etc. For this reason, MDPI has signed up to the Jussieu call and welcomes its aims.

More information can be found at http://jussieucall.org/ (archived here)

The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s popular blog about topics in academic publishing, Scholarly Kitchen, recently interviewed MDPI’s CEO, Dr. Franck Vazquez. He shared some thoughts and information on the past and future of MDPI and open access publishing in general:

“In the long run, we aim to anchor MDPI in research communities. We recently developed and launched the preprint platform Preprints, revamped our free-to-use conference hosting platform Sciforum, and are working on other projects, such as Scilit, our bibliographic database.”

Read the full interview here.

We will be attending the 2017 MRS Fall Meeting which will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from November 26–December 1, 2017, and representing the following open access journals:

Materials
Nanomaterials
Energies
Metals
Applied Sciences
Crystals
Minerals
Journal of Functional Biomaterials
Coatings
Robotics
Biosensors
Chemosensors
Polymers
Bioengineering

Please come along to our booth (booth number: #122) to chat with our delegates about our journals and hear about our travel awards offered to Postdocs and PhD students. Our delegates will also answer any questions about online publishing and our journals. We look forward to meeting you in person in Boston!

For more information on the conference, please visit:
www.mrs.org/fall2017

We are delighted to have welcomed 24 new participants to our Institutional Open Access Programme (IOAP) since the beginning of September this year. These are University libraries and Research Institutions located around the world; from the USA and Canada to the UK, and from Norway and Spain to Greece. Well respected Universities, such as the University of Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Arizona in the US, have signed up, while their researchers can now benefit from a 10% discount on the Article Processing Charges (APC) for any papers they publish in MDPI journals, at no cost for the library or the University.

We are more than happy to see the Open Access movement growing stronger and wider every day and we appreciate the vital role which librarians, repository managers, and other scholarly communications professionals play in the field. Our communication with and service to this community is, therefore, one of our principal priorities. The IOAP is our way to support academic and scientific Institutions as well as their scholars in managing, administrating, and publishing research in an Open Access world.

The IOAP set of free services, provided by MDPI to institutions that sign up, include:

• No fee for participants and no obligation to prolong after the initial 12 months. The participants may withdraw from the programme at any time, and we will also keep it free for the library for as long as they continue in the programme.
• Authors affiliated with the university will receive a discount on the article processing charge (APC).
• The institution is granted free access to the MDPI submission system and can receive free alerts of new submissions to our journals.
• By default, authors from the institution will continue to be invoiced directly unless the institution opts for central billing.
• Auto-archiving of papers into the institutions´ repository as long as it supports SWORD 1.3.

More details about the programme and a list of our current participant institutions can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap

Institutions which are interested to participate may do so online at: https://www.mdpi.com/ioap-form

 The full list of the Institutions that signed up in September is as follows:

1. University of Denver, USA
2. University of Colorado Boulder, USA
3. University of Arizona, USA
4. Institute of Metrology of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina
5. Middlebury College, USA
6. Touro College, USA
7. University of New Orleans, USA
8. University of Leicester, UK
9. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, USA
10. University of Strathclyde, UK
11. Cranfield University, UK
12. Hope College, USA
13. Oregon State University, USA
14. Drew University, USA
15. Swansea University, UK
16. University of South Florida, USA
17. University of Georgia, USA
18. Arizona State University, USA
19. University of Southern Mississippi, USA
20. Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada
21. Grinnell College, USA
22. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
23. University of Patras, Greece
24. Public University of Navarre, Spain

Congratulations to the authors Javier Monroy and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez from Universidad de Malaga, Spain, Victor Hernandez-Bennets, Han Fan and Achim Lilienthal from Örebro University, Sweden for publishing the 100,000th peer-reviewed article.

The article is published in the Chemical Sensors section of Sensors.

GADEN: A 3D Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments

Evermore pressing environmental concerns have led global actors and decision-makers to search for stricter emission monitoring approaches. As part of novel monitoring systems, robots with gas and environmental sensors are a promising solution. However, validation of such robotic inspectors is expensive, time consuming, and plagued by repeatability issues. In this article, we present GADEN (the short form for Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments), which combines gas dispersion and robotics simulation in a common framework. Developed under the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS), GADEN enables validation of sensing strategies with gas dispersion being simulated using computational fluid dynamics and filament dispersion theory. GADEN allows simulating complex, realistic, 3D environments for reproducible testing of robotic gas sensing algorithms. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we show that GADEN is a versatile and user-friendly evaluation tool and emphasize its enormous potential for the mobile robot olfaction community.

Read the full article here: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/7/1479/htm

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Materials:

We will be attending the World of Photonic Congress 2017, which takes place June 25-29, 2017, representing the following open access journals:

Applied Sciences
Materials
Technologies
Photonics
Micromachines

Please come along to our stand, to have a chat about our journals with our delegates about our journals andor to learn more about our travel awards that offered to Postdocs and PhD students by the representeding journals offering to Postdocs and PhD students.

Conference address:
World of Photonic Congress 2017
International Congress Center, Munich, Germany

Conference date:
June 25–-29 2017

For more information on the conference, please visit:
http://www.cleoeurope.org/world-of-photonics-congress

The CiteScore, the new citation metric for journals covered in the Scopus® database, was released on 1 June 2017, reflecting the citation activity in 2016 for articles published during the three previous years. Please note that the list below does not contain all MDPI journals covered in Scopus. For the CiteScore to serve as a reliable metric at least three volumes of articles need to be indexed in Scopus; journals which have not met this criterion have been omitted here.

Ten MDPI journals received a CiteScore which is in the Top 10% of scores in at least one of the categories, while a further 21 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

We are pleased to announce that the Goethe University of Frankfurt, the Technical University of Hamburg (TU Hamburg-Harburg), as well as the Humboldt University of Berlin, in Germany, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

As an open access publisher, we are keen to support openness and transparency in the research process. Citation data is very important for assessing the value of individual papers and the contribution of researchers. As such, we support the recently launched Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). The initiative recognizes that citations should be freely available and machine-readable. By doing so, authors gain the maximum benefit from having their work cited.

MDPI now uploads citation data with metadata uploaded to Crossref when registering digital object identifiers (DOIs) for published papers. We are delighted to take this step to support a truly open research environment.

Getting high quality review reports is critical for any journal’s editorial process. At MDPI we have put in place several measures to motivate reviewers and reward them for their work. We are proud of the quality of reviewer reports we receive and grateful for the hours put in by active researchers from across the globe.

Reviewers of MDPI’s largest journals can get recognition via Publons, a website dedicated to rewarding peer reviewers. They have now taken this one step further and launched the Publons Reviewer Academy to help train reviewers to provide useful feedback. Through the academy, researchers can be trained and tutored in various aspects of how to provide structured feedback that will be of genuine help to editors and authors. We support this initiative and recommend it to potential MDPI reviewers, especially early career researchers. See the Publons announcement for further information.

More information on reviewing for MDPI, including how to volunteer as a reviewer, can be found here.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA and the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

Preprints.org is a platform run by MDPI that allows authors to make early versions of manuscripts available before peer review has been completed.

One of the major benefits of putting a preprint online is to get feedback before journal submission. Until now, however, the feedback has been on a voluntary basis. Preprints is delighted to be the first preprint server to collaborate with Publons to acknowledge substantial comments as reviews and give commentators the opportunity to receive credit for their efforts. 

When you add a comment to any article, there is a check box to click for it to appear on Publons. If you have already linked your account it will be passed on automatically. If you don't already have a Publons account, you will be contacted soon afterwards with instructions on how to create one.

We appreciate the enthusiasm and cooperation of Publons in this project and expect it to be of great benefit to authors and commenters alike.

We are pleased to announce that our annual report for the year 2016 has now been published. 

It contains information regarding company and journal performance, conferences and other publishing services that we provided throughout 2016. 

To read the report in full or download a copy, please click here.

MDPI will be attending the 253rd American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition, which takes place 2–6 April 2017, representing the following open access journals:

Molecules
Materials
Energies
Nanomaterials
Catalysts
Applied Sciences
Batteries
Coatings
Metals 
Magnetochemistry
Marine Drugs
Processes
Pharmaceuticals
Symmetry

If you are planning to attend, please visit our booth (Number 1618) to talk to our delegates about our journals and open access publishing. Also feel free to attend our ‘Meet and Greet’ session at 12:30pm on 3 April with Dr. Derek J. McPhee, the Editor-in-Chief of our journal Molecules. Food and refreshments will be provided.  

Conference address:

MDPI - Booth 1618
253rd American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition
The Moscone Center, 747 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
USA

After the 20th anniversary of MDPI in 2016, we will reach another milestone this year and will publish the 100,000th peer-reviewed article in one of our 170+ open access journals.

We would like you to be part of this great achievement and so are offering to publish the 100,000th accepted paper free of charge.

To be in with a chance, select a journal in one of our 10 scientific subject areas and submit your paper.

Access the live tracker on published articles here.

We are delighted that Preprints now has 1000 papers online since its launch on 3 May 2016.

For more information, see the editorial here.

Earlier this week the Science Technology Park in Belgrade, Serbia was visited by Swiss Secretary of State Dr. Mauro Dell’Ambrogio, as well as Serbian Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government Ana Brnabic, State Secretary Dr. Vladimir Popovic and Mayor of Belgrade Mr. Siniša Mali.

During the visit to the STP they had a short presentation from MDPI’s CEO Dr. Franck Vazquez and IT Manager Mr. Miloš Čučulović, and further discussed important issues such as Open Access and Open education. Dr. Dell'Ambrogio said he was impressed with the potential for development and ideas for business.

For more information please see:

http://bit.ly/2kpIu7k and http://bit.ly/2kpUQfz

We are pleased to announce that the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, the University of Manitoba, Canada and the Technical University of Cartagena, Spain, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

The 6^th World Sustainability Forum is currently being held at the Cape Sun Hotel until 28 January 2017. 

The Forum will showcase the work of internationally renowned researchers and include more than 150 presentations. During the conference dinner, the World Sustainability Award, associated with a US$ 100,000 prize, will be announced, as well as the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award, associated with a US$ 10,000 prize. The prizes are sponsored by the MDPI Sustainability Foundation and Sustainability, an academic open access journal by MDPI.

Here are some pictures from the forum so far:

To see the full WSF2017 program and schedule, please see here: https://sciforum.net/conference/wsf-6/page/schedule

Cape Town will host the 6^th World Sustainability Forum at the Cape Sun Hotel on 27 and 28 January 2017. This prominent event, held for the first time in Africa, will include many illustrious South African and international experts, such as Her Excellency Graça Machel (Sustainable Development Advocate for the United Nations, Mozambique), Joyene Isaacs (HoD Agriculture Western Cape Government), Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University, USA), Max Bergman (SRaM, University of Basel), Mark New (Pro Vice-Chancellor, University of Cape Town), Frans Swanepoel (FutureAfrica, University of Pretoria) and Francis Petersen (Vice-Chancellor-designate, University of the Free State). The Forum will provide a stage for national and international debates on sustainability in South Africa, the African continent, and about international perspectives on sustainability. It brings together researchers and representatives from government and the business sector to discuss a wide-ranging set of issues associated with sustainability, including food security, water and energy scarcity, mining, poverty reduction, climate change, and urbanisation.

The next few decades will be marked by profound changes in the relationships between global economics, national societies, and the environment. We have entered what some call the Anthropocene, an age in which human activity dominates the climate and the environment. These changes will have numerous consequences on societies around the globe. South Africa and Africa will play a central role, for better or worse, in creating opportunities and risks during these changing times as Africa is profoundly influencing and being influenced by global developments.

The adoption of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September 2015 was accompanied by what insiders considered an optimism they have not experienced in relation to UN resolutions before. The relative efficiency in the drafting, the lack of trenches between East and West, or between North and South, and the unanimity of support of the 193 countries speak volumes. In stark contrast, sustainability seems to go against a changing economic and political tide, where waves of nationalism and protectionism from some of the most powerful countries risk the wellbeing of the rest of the world. The 6^th World Sustainability Forum will enable fruitful exchanges, which sensitise South African and international communities to the global urgency and specifics of sustainability.

The Forum will showcase the work of internationally renowned researchers and include more than 150 presentations. During the conference dinner, the World Sustainability Award, associated with a US$ 100 000 prize, will be announced, as well as the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award, associated with a US$ 10 000 prize. The prizes are sponsored by the MDPI Sustainability Foundation and Sustainability, an academic open access journal by MDPI. The World Sustainability Forum is preceded by the Postgraduate Forum on Sustainability, which will introduce more than 100 young scholars from South Africa and the African continent to sustainability research. Both events are organized and sponsored by the University of Cape Town, the University of the Western Cape, the University of Basel, MDPI, and by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.

Contacts:

Scientific Matters: Prof Manfred Max Bergman, Social Research and Methodology Group (SRaM), University of Basel, Switzerland; Email:  [email protected]

Press Accreditation and General Enquiries: Mr Matthias Burkhalter, MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland; Email: [email protected]; Tel. +41 61 683 77 34 

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#WSF2017SA

MDPI is now a proud supporter of the OA2020 Initiative.

Open Access 2020 is an international initiative that aims to induce the swift, smooth and scholarly-oriented transformation of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to open access publishing.

MDPI is participating in the upcoming Berlin13 conference in March 2017, where we are contributing to the initiative by aiding in the design of the roadmap which will make OA the default publishing model.

For more information please see here.

We are pleased to announce that MDPI will be attending the 2017 SPIE Photonics West Conference (28 January-2 February, 2017) and representing the following open access journals:

Sensors
Photonics
Micromachines
Materials
Applied Sciences
Journal of Imaging
Inventions
Computation
Technologies
Remote Sensing
Biosensors
Electronics

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #4220) and meet the representative editors.

Conference details:

SPIE Photonics West 2017
28 January-2 February, 2017
Moscone Center
747 Howard St
San Francisco, CA 94103, USA

We are pleased to announce that the University of Texas at Arlington, USA, the Harbin Institute of Technology, China and TU Darmstadt, Germany, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.