Announcements

The updated citation metrics have been released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), published by Clarivate. The recent release of the JCR includes seventy-one MDPI titles. Out of these, 18 titles are newcomers, receiving a first Journal Impact Factor which is based on citation activity in 2019: Actuators, Agriculture, Biology, Biomedicines, Biosensors, Chemosensors, Children, Healthcare, Journal of Fungi, Journal of Personalized Medicine (JPM), Land, Life, Magnetochemistry, Membranes, Pharmaceuticals, Photonics, Separations and Toxics.

• Out of the previously listed journals, a total of 72 percent boast an increased Impact Factor.
• 25 journals are ranked among the top 25% of journals in at least one of the categories they are ranked for.
• Articles published in 2019 in MDPI journals account for approximately 17 percent of of articles published in gold Open Access journals covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
  
  

First Impact Factors

Updated Impact Factors

The Mathematics 2021 Best Paper Award is now open. A total of six winners will be selected from all research articles and reviews published in Mathematics in 2019 according to their citations in 2020 as well as their originality. The winners will be announced after a final decision is made, following review and voting by the Mathematics Best Paper Award Committee.

The six winners (each corresponding author) will receive a certificate and an offer to publish a paper free of charge in Mathematics, subject to the standard peer review procedure. In addition, each winner will receive a prize based on the award class:

• First Prize (one paper): 500 CHF
• Second Prize (two papers): 300 CHF
• Third Prize (three papers): 200 CHF

The winner will be announced by 31 March 2021 on the journal website.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2020 Mathematics Young Investigator Award is Dr. Ángel Alberto Magreñán Ruiz.

Dr. Magreñán is currently a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Department of Mathematics and Computation at the University of La Rioja, Spain. He has provided salient contributions to applied mathematics and mathematics education. Major contributions distinguishing him include the following: (1) local and semilocal convergence of iterative methods with and without memory, enlarging the problems (such us chemical problems, differential equation problems, or modeling problems) that can be solved using these iterative methods. (2) Dr. Magreñán has also studied the dynamical properties of different iterative methods, including real dynamics and a tool to study real dynamics or complex dynamics with two parameters, which has been used by many authors. (3) Dr. Magreñán is productive and influential in the fields of applied mathematics and mathematics education. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Magreñán on receiving this award and for his outstanding achievements.

As the awardee, Dr. Magreñán will receive an honorarium of 2000 CHF and an engraved plaque.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee Members for their evaluation of the many excellent nominations.

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

The Mathematics Editorial Board and Editorial Team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy committed by our reviewers in checking manuscripts submitted to the journal. It is due to their efforts that the high quality of the journal and quick submission-to-publication process have been maintained. The median time from submission to first decision is 21 days and the median time to publication is 40 days.

The following referees have been selected by the Editor-in-Chief of Mathematics, Prof. Dr. José A. Tenreiro Machado, to receive Mathematics 2019 Outstanding Reviewer Awards for the quantity, timeliness, and quality of their reviews in 2019. Each of them will receive 500 CHF, an offer to publish a Feature Paper free of charge in Mathematics, and a certificate to recognize their outstanding work:

Prof. Denis Butusov
Petersburg State Electrotechnical University, Russia

Dr. João Cabral
University of Azores, Portugal

Dr. Moreno Concezzi
Roma Tre University, Italy

Mathematics (ISSN 2227-7390) is a peer-reviewed open access journal that provides an advanced forum for studies related to mathematics, and is published monthly online by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland. The journal is covered by leading indexing services, including Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) and Scopus. Coverage starts from 2016, Volume 4. For further details, please refer to:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/mathematics

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.

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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.

Dear Authors,

I am pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Best Paper Award. Six research articles were selected for this award. All papers published in 2018 in Mathematics were considered for the award. An Evaluation Committee considered the originality and significance of the papers as well as the citations and downloads in 2019 in determining the winners.

The first prize article is:

Numerical Solution of Fractional Differential Equations: A Survey and a Software Tutorial by Roberto Garrappa.

The second prize articles are:

Numerical solution of Multi-Term Fractional Differential Equations Using the Matrix Mittag--Leffler Functions by Marina Popolizio;

Data Driven Economic Model Predictive Control by Prashant Mhaskar and Masoud Kheradmandi;

The third prize articles are:

Computation of Probability Associated with Anderson-Darling Statistic by Sorana Bolboacă and Lorentz Jäntschi;

Approximate dynamic Programming Based Control of Proppant Concentration in Hydraulic Fracturing by Joseph Kwon, Prashanth Siddhamshetty and Harwinder Singh Sidhu;

Recurrent Neural Network-Based Model Predictive Control for Continuous Pharmaceutical Manufacturing by Xiaonan Wang, Jiali Li, Ewan Chee, and Wee Chin Wong;

Congratulations to the authors on these six outstanding papers!

Prof. José A. Tenreiro Machado
Editor-in-Chief

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: office@encyclopedia.pub)

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.