MDPI will be attending the Advanced Membrane Technology Summit for Water Treatment 2021, jointly hosted by the International Water Association (IWA), China Regional Office and Tongji University, which will be held from 15 to 17 October 2021, in Shanghai, China.

Famous domestic and foreign experts will give keynote speeches during the conference, in addition to poster exhibitions, postgraduate seminars and other academic activities. This summit is focused on the theme of "Sustainable Development of Membrane Water Treatment Technology under the Background of Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality". Topics covered by the summit include, but are not limited to, membrane water and wastewater treatment, new theories of membrane processes, advanced membranes and membrane modules, advanced membrane processes and combined processes, sustainable membrane water treatment technologies, and the industrial application of membrane technology.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Membranes;
• Separations;
• IJERPH;
• Applied Sciences;
• Water;
• Toxics;
• Resources;
• Sustainability;
• ChemEngineering.

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth. 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://amts2021.scimeeting.cn/cn/web/index/12145.

MDPI will be attending the 21st Chinese Zeolite Conference (21 CZC), hosted by the Chinese Zeolite Association and China University of Petroleum, which will be held from 27 to 30 September 2021 in Qingdao, China. The conference will be held at the International Conference Center of China Railway Qingdao World Expo City. More than 1500 delegates are expected to attend.

The theme of this conference is “Porous Materials and Future Energy”. The conference aims to show the latest progress in the field of zeolite and porous material in China and discuss the responsibilities, opportunities, and challenges in zeolite and related porous functional material chemistry in the new era of energy reform and sustainable development. We also aim to further promote the development and achievements of zeolite science and technology.

The main topics of the conference include: the synthesis, modification, and characterization of porous zeolite materials; host-guest chemistry and functional materials; adsorption, separation, and diffusion performances; porous material catalysis and chemical processes; theoretical calculations and simulations of porous material properties, structures, and applications.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Molecules;
• Separations;
• Energies;
• Crystals;
• Materials;
• Membranes;
• Inorganics;
• Sustainability;
• Sustainable Chemistry;
• Symmetry;
• Reactions.

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#B20). 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.chemsoc.org.cn/meeting/21czc/.

Rigorous peer-review is the cornerstone of high-quality academic publishing. Over 369,916 scholars served as reviewers for MDPI journals in 2020. 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 of all reviewers’ names to express our gratitude. In addition, this year, the MDPI Top Reviewer Award was announced, to recognize the very best reviewers for their expertise and dedication, and their high-quality, and timely review reports. We are pleased to announce the following winners of the 2020 MDPI Top Reviewer Award:

• Adriana Burlea-Schiopoiu;
• Alban Kuriqi;
• Álvaro González-Vila;
• Alessandro Alaimo;
• Alexey Beskopylny;
• Alexander Yu Churyumov;
• Alberto Fernández-Isabel;
• Andrea Mastinu;
• Antonios N. Papadopoulos;
• Anton Rassõlkin;
• Antonio Humberto Hamad Minervino;
• Arkadiusz Matwijczuk;
• Artur Słomka;
• Baojie He;
• Bartłomiej Potaniec;
• Bojan Đurin;
• Camilo Arturo Rodriguez Diaz;
• Carmelo Maria Musarella;
• Chiachung Chen;
• Chiman Kwan;
• Cristian Busu;
• Danil Pimenov;
• Dan-Cristian Dabija;
• Delfín Ortega-Sánchez;
• Demetrio Antonio Zema;
• Denis Butusov;
• Elena Lucchi;
• Gaurab Dutta;
• Livia Anastasiu;
• M. R. Safaei.

For more information about how to become a reviewer of MDPI journals, please see: www.mdpi.com/reviewers.

UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. In 2020 the SDG Publishers Compact was launched, aimed to inspire publishers and accelerate progress to achieve the 17 goals by 2030. Members of the programme are committed to support the publication of materials that will promote and inspire actions towards SDGs.

MDPI is an eager advocate of SDGs and has already been supporting the programme by creating Special Issues and publishing a series of books on SDGs prior to joining the Compact in 2021. MDPI's Sustainability Foundation initiated the World Sustainability Awards in 2016. We fully support UN's goals to promote sustainable actions that make the world a better place for all and, as part of its commitment, we will focus our actions on SDG10: Reduced Inequalities whilst promoting all 17 SDGs. For more details, please visit the programme’s website: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sdg-publishers-compact/.

Joining this initiative was a unanimous decision. MDPI has in its core values the dissemination of science for all, breaking the wall between research access and under-represented members of the scientific community and the general population. To support this initiative further and continue to support under-represented scientists, MDPI will take a series of actions that will be announced once ready.

The first action MDPI takes is to nominate Dr. Liliane Auwerter as the coordinator of the programme. Dr. Auwerter studied Environmental Process Technology (UTFPR, Brazil), obtained her MSc degree in Water and Environmental Engineering (University of Surrey, UK) and in 2020 completed her PhD in self-healing low-friction materials for water transport (Imperial College London, UK), always focusing on diverse scientific projects that would potentially bring sustainability to industrial processes. As a student in Brazil, she engaged in volunteering activities focused on environmental education and took part in the Millennial Development Goals meetings held at the university.

For more information, please contact:
Dr. Liliane Auwerter
Scientific Officer
[email protected]

This serves to announce to our valued authors based in Japan that value-added tax, or consumption tax will now be imposed on article processing fees and other service fees for all papers submitted, or resubmitted (assigned new paper IDs), effective from 15 August 2021. The change is in accordance with the Japanese "Act for Partial Revision of the Income Tax Act and Other Acts" (Act No. 9 of 2015), which includes a revision of consumption taxation on cross-border supplies of services such as digital content distribution.

For additional information from the National Tax Agency please see here ("Cross-border supplies of electronic services").

Contact: Setsuko Nishihara, MDPI Tokyo

The 2020 citation metrics have been officially released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)!

We are pleased to announce that 85 MDPI journals are included, of which:

• 10 journals received their first impact factor
• 96% of journals increased their impact factor from 2019
• 32 journals (38%) ranked among the top 25% of journals, in at least one category

* Journals given their first Impact Factor in 2021

We are pleased to inform you that the open access journal Membranes is now covered in the "Chemistry Physical" category in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)—Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics). 

Membranes (ISSN 2077-0375) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal. The journal covers broad science and technology related aspects of both biological and non-biological membranes. Membranes provides a forum for publishing papers that advance our understanding of membrane structure, performance, processes, and applications that cover membrane chemistry, physics, engineering, and biology. The journal publishes original reviews, research articles, and short communications. Authors are encouraged to publish their experimental and theoretical results in as much detail as possible. Thus, there is no restriction on paper length. Full experimental, theoretical, and computational details must be provided so that the results can be reproduced. 

We ask you to consider Membranes as the platform for publishing your work. 

Membranes Editorial Office

We are pleased to announce that 24 new scholars were recently appointed Editorial Board Members for the journal Membranes.

Prof. Dr. Slav W. Hermanowicz (University of California, USA)
Dr. Sébastien Déon (Univ Bourgogne Franche Comte, France)
Prof. Dr. Anthony Gordon Fane (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Dr. Vítor Geraldes (Univ. Lisbon, Portugal)
Prof. Dr. Jean-Christophe Remigy (Université de Toulouse, France)
Dr. Sabrina Morelli (Institute on Membrane Technology, Italy)
Dr. Geelsu Hwang (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Prof. Dr. Jack Gilron (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
Prof. Dr. Xiaodong Wang (North China Electric Power University, China)
Prof. Dr. John Fraser (University of Queensland, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Jiahua Zhu (Nanjing Tech University, China)
Prof. Dr. Xinsheng Peng (Zhejiang University, China)
Dr. David Alfredo Pacheco Tanaka (Tecnalia Research & Innovation, Spain)
Dr. Vitaly Gitis (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
Dr. Laura Donato (Institute on Membrane Technology, Italy)
Prof. Dr. Hyung Chul Ham (Inha University, Korea)
Prof. Dr. Yu Tian (Harbin Institute of Technology, China)
Prof. Dr. Weifeng Li (Shandong University, China)
Prof. Dr. Hongjun Lin (Zhejiang Normal University, China)
Prof. Dr. Huaqiang Chu (Tongji University, China)
Prof. Dr. Masahiko Matsukata (Waseda University, Japan)
Prof. Dr. Jiangnan Shen (Zhejiang University of Technology, China)
Dr. Mariano Andrea Scorciapino (University of Cagliari, Italy)
Prof. Dr. Alexander Toikka (St. Petersburg State University, Russia)
We wish them every success in developing the journal. 

Further details about the Editorial Board can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/membranes/editors.

MDPI Books recently released Book Builder, a new online tool to conveniently arrange, design and produce an eBook from any content published in MDPI journals. Book Builder offers two functions: on the one hand (1) Selections, available to every registered user of MDPI; on the other hand (2) Special Issue Reprints, which can be used exclusively by Guest Editors of Special Issues.

Selections

In just a matter of a few clicks, all users are now able to assemble books from MDPI articles and receive instantaneous feedback in the form of a fully produced and compiled book (PDF), which can be downloaded or ordered as print copy. Selections can include any paper published with MDPI, picking and combining content from different journals and special issues.

This way, the user may for example choose to compile an ebook focusing around a particular topic, or assemble articles from a group of others.

We invite you to make yourself familiar with the new tool! The Book Builder can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/books/book_builder.

Special Issue Reprints

The Book Builder allows Guest Editors of MDPI journals to create a reprint from a successfully completed Special Issue or Topical Collection in book format. If you are a Guest Editor for an MDPI journal, you can use the new tool  to create an PDF document which includes all articles published in the Special Issue as well as a book cover and table of contents.

For Special Issues containing a minimum of 5 articles, the Guest Editor can request its publication on the MDPI Book platform. Published reprints are assigned an ISBN and DOI.

In addition to the PDF copy of the Reprint Book, as a token of our gratitude, MDPI offers every Guest Editor one (1) complimentary print copy (via print-on-demand). All contributors benefit from a discount on orders of any additional print copies, to share with colleagues or libraries or others.

Why choose MDPI Books?

In line with our organization's values, MDPI Books publishes all content in open access, promoting the exchange of ideas and knowledge in a globalized world. MDPI Books encompasses all the benefits of open access—high availability and visibility, as well as wide and rapid dissemination. MDPI Books are distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License, meaning as an author you retain the copyright for your work. In addition, with MDPI Books you can complement the digital version of your work with a high-quality printed counterpart.

If you are interested in editing a book volume or series, or have a monograph manuscript to be considered for publication, please submit your proposal online and look at our Information for Authors.

Contact: Laura Wagner, MDPI Books Manager (email)

In June of this year, MDPI will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its foundation. To mark this significant milestone, we have created a 25th Anniversary page on our website that evokes the development of our company over the past quarter-century.

MDPI has been a pioneer of Open Access publishing ever since the concept was first created.

In a wide-ranging interview, our CEO Delia Mihaila reflects on the company’s 25th anniversary and its contribution to the world of scientific publishing.

Delia considers how MDPI has evolved since starting life in 1996 as a visionary ‘project’ run out of an apartment in Basel, Switzerland, by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin. A chemist who was passionate about the long-term preservation of rare chemical sample, Dr. Lin was determined to help scholars publish their findings as quickly as possible and make their research results available to as wide a readership as possible worldwide. That determination remains unchanged 25 years later.

Today, MDPI is an international organization with over 4,000 employees based on three continents and in ten countries, and ranks among the world's top four academic publishers.

MDPI's mission is to accelerate access to new scientific research, delivering insight faster for researchers worldwide. Read more here about the company's remarkable success story and what the Open Access publishing model can offer the global scientific community.

We are pleased to announce that 29 new scholars were recently appointed as Editorial Board Members for the journal Membranes.

Prof. Dr. Kwang Jin Kim (University of Southern California, USA)
Prof. Dr. Seunghyeon Moon (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Korea)
Prof. Dr. Jonathan Soboloff (Temple University, USA)
Prof. Dr. Petros Samaras (International Hellenic University, Greece)
Prof. Dr. Gyula Vatai (Szent István University, Hungary)
Prof. Dr. Byung Joo Kim (Pusan National University, Korea)
Prof. Dr. Maxime Pontié (Angers University, France)
Prof. Dr. Shihe Yang (Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, China)
Prof. Dr. Udo Kragl (University of Rostock, Germany)
Prof. Dr. Fu Liu (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
Prof. Dr. Huanting Wang (Monash University, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Xiaomao Wang (Tsinghua University, China)
Dr. Carme Güell (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain)
Prof. Dr. Dimitrios Stamatialis (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Dr. Aaron Thornton (CSIRO Manufacturing, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Anastasios J. Karabelas (Centre for Research and Technology—Hellas (CERTH), Greece)
Prof. Dr. Zhaoxiang Zhong (Nanjing Tech University, China)
Prof. Dr. Karel Friess (University of Chemistry and Technology (UCT) Prague, Czech Republic)
Prof. Dr. Hong Wu (Tianjin University, China)
Prof. Dr. Rebecca Green (University of Reading, UK)
Prof. Dr. Zhi Wang (Tianjin University, China)
Dr. Dinis Reis Miranda (Erasmus University Medical Center, The Netherlands)
Prof. Dr. Gheorghe Benga (Romanian Academy, Romania)
Prof. Dr. Liyuan Deng (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway)
Dr. Byungchan Bae (Korea Institute of Energy Research, Korea)
Dr. Hyung Keun Lee (Korea Institute of Energy Research, Korea)
Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schuster (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria)
Dr. Alessandra Criscuoli (Institute on Membrane Technology (ITM-CNR), Italy)
Dr. Jean Chemin (Universités de Montpellier, France) 

We wish them every success in developing the journal. 

Further details about the Editorial Board can be found at:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/membranes/editors.

At MDPI, we strive to make your online publication process seamless and efficient. To achieve this, our team is continuously developing tools and features to make the user experience useful and convenient.

As the number of academic papers continues to grow, so does the need to analyze and work with them on a large scale. This prompted us to design a new feature aimed at helping researchers find journals that are relevant to their publication by matching their abstract topic. In this regard, we designed a similarity model that automatically identifies the most suitable academic journals for your paper.

We are pleased to introduce Journal Selector, a new feature that measures similarity in academic contexts. By simply entering the title and/or abstract into our Journal Selector, the author will see a list of the most related scientific journals published by MDPI. This method helps authors select the correct journals for their papers, highlighting the time of publication and citability.

The methodology is known as representation learning, where words are represented as vectors in hyperspace. Representation helps us differentiate between different concepts within articles, and in turn, helps us identify similarities between them.

We used an advanced machine learning model to better capture the semantic meanings of words. This helps the algorithm make better predictions by leveraging scientific text representation. In turn, this ensures high precision, helping authors decide which journal they should submit their paper to.

The goal is to support authors to publish their work in the most suitable journal for their research, as fast as possible, accelerating their career progress.

Contact: Andrea Perlato, Head of Data Analytics, MDPI (email)

We hope to call upon your expertise as a reviewer to help maintain the quality and efficiency of Membranes.

We are particularly interested in recruiting reviewers in the below-listed fields related to membranes science. In recent decades, this area has attracted a lot of research interest and significant progress has been made. We welcome scholars with research experience in topics including, but not limited to, the following:

Membrane Preparation and Characterization
Fundamentals of Membrane Processes
Membrane Engineering and Applications
Membrane Modeling and Simulation
Membranes in Life Sciences

As a reviewer, you will receive the following benefits:

1. The Membranes Editorial Board will acknowledge all reviewers in its annual reviewer list through a publication/announcement in the "Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Membranes" editorial on the journal website.
2. Reviewer members who provide prompt, thorough, and rigorous peer-review reports will receive a voucher that can be applied to reduce the cost of their next publication in an MDPI journal.
3. Reviewers may be presented with the possibility of joining the Editorial Board of the journal (subject to the approval of the Editor-in-Chief).

We would greatly appreciate your support and if you are interested in this position, please submit your information at https://susy.mdpi.com/volunteer/journals/review.

Membranes is launching a new position—Topic Editor. The main responsibilities of Topic Editors are as follows:

1. Setting up at least one Special Issue (SI) within the first two years of the journal opening, and proposing a detailed strategy plan for the SI (including soliciting papers, promoting the SI, etc.);
2. Promoting the journal during conferences (adding 1–2 slides into your presentation, distributing flyers, recommending the journal to your colleagues, etc.);
3. Facilitating a collaboration between the journal and related institutions/societies/conferences, etc.;
4. Providing support for Special Issues on topics related to your expertise or when the Guest Editor(s) is/are not available, including SI promotion via social media, pre-checking new submissions, making decisions, giving advice on particular scientific cases, etc.

Benefits:

1. 50% discounts on the article processing charge (APC, 1800 CHF) for papers published in Membranes per year in the Special Issues you supervise, and special discounts on any additional papers from your group or by your invitation;
2. Travel grants per year if you lead a successful Special Issue and would like to promote it at conferences that you attend or organize;
3. Additional sponsorships for conferences organized by Topic Editors.

If you are interested in this role or if you have any suggestions, please feel free to contact us ([email protected]).

For more information about Membranes, please visit the website:

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

It is our pleasure to welcome the following recognized researchers, who recently joined the Editorial Board of Membranes:

Prof. Dr. Akihiko Tanioka, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Prof. Dr. Kew-Ho Lee, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Korea

Prof. Dr. Marek Bryjak, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland

Prof. Dr. Michael Zharnikov, Heidelberg University, Germany

Prof. Dr. José Villalaín Boullón, Universitas “Miguel Hernández”, Spain

Prof. Dr. Bart Van der Bruggen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Prof. Dr. César Valderrama, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)-BarcelonaTECH, Spain

Prof. Dr. Dimitrios Stamatialis, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Prof. Dr. Ivo F.J. Vankelecom, KU Leuven, Belgium

Prof. Dr. Michael Stoukides, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Prof. Dr. Yung Chang, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan

Prof. Kamalesh K. Sirkar, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA

Prof. Dr. Sangho Lee, Kookmin University, Korea

Prof. Dr. Eric Guibal, Institut Mines Telecom—Mines Ales, France

Prof. Dr. Hongyang Ma, Stony Brook University, USA

Dr. Mazeyar Parvinzadeh Gashti, Research and Development Laboratory, Canada

Prof. Dr. Moon-Sung Kang, Sangmyung University, Korea

Prof. Dr. Nidal Hilal, Swansea University, UK

MDPI is proud to adopt the principles of the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) to support building equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications.

The C4DISC represents organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications and is focused on addressing issues of diversity and inclusion within the publishing industry.

MDPI’s Managing Editors encourage the Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, geographic location, sexual orientation, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and editors of MDPI journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.

Representatives from C4DISC meet monthly, and have started to implement initiatives to shed light and improve on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. Some of the initiatives include developing a joint statement of principles; conducting market research; providing training resources, best practices, toolkits, and documentation for our collective memberships; and establishing outreach programs, curricula, events, and publications.

The Coalition is committed to:

• eliminating barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination;
• creating and maintaining an environment that respects diverse traditions, heritages, and experiences;
• promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making;
• raising awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce;
• supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations.

We are pleased to announce that Membranes has passed the milestone of having published 1000 papers since its inception in 2011. On behalf of the editorial team, we would like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief of Membranes Prof. Dr. Spas D. Kolev, and Section Editors-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Shiro Suetsugu, Prof. Dr. Giulio C. Sarti, Prof. Dr. Benjamin S. Hsiao, Prof. Dr. Wojciech Kujawski, and Prof. Dr. Clàudia Fontàs. Our gratitude extends to all the Editorial Board Members, Topic Board members, and Guest Editors of Special Issues. Together, they have ensured the continued success of the journal through their hard work and diligence. In addition, we also acknowledge the many valuable publications from our authors and the important contribution of our dedicated reviewers. We wish to thank you all for your support, and we look forward to receiving more quality submissions from you in the future.

Membranes (ISSN 2077-0375) is an open-access journal published monthly online by MDPI, covering all aspects of science and technology of both biological and non-biological membranes. It is now covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) and Scopus. With a 2019 Impact Factor of 3.094, it ranks 53th out of 143 (Q2) titles in the ‘’Engineering, Chemical’’, 129th of 314 (Q2) titles in the ‘’Materials Science, Multidisciplinary’’, and 23rd out of 89 (Q2) titles in the ‘’Polymer Science’’ categories.

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 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/

It is our pleasure to welcome the following 35 recognized researchers to join the Editorial Board of Membranes. We look forward to their contributions to the journal.

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].

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 editors are pleased to inform that Membranes has received a first Impact Factor of 3.094, as published in the 2019 Edition of the Journal Citation Reports® (Clarivate), released just now. Membranes ranks 53th out of 143 (Q2) titles in the 'Engineering, Chemical', as well as 129th put of 314 (Q2) titles in the 'Materials Science, Multidisciplinary' and 23rd out of 89 (Q2) titles in 'Polymer Science' category.

Thank you to the authors, editorial board members and reviewers for their contribution in achieving this milestone for Membranes.

In May 2020, the Membrane Society of Australasia (MSA) became affiliated to Membranes. As part of this collaboration, all members of MSA enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) when submitting articles to Membranes.

The Membrane Society of Australasia (MSA) Society was founded in 2009 with the goal of bringing together key academics, industrial professionals, and emerging membranologists to further membrane science and technology within Australasia. The MSA is also a founding member of the World Association of Membrane Societies (WA-MS, http://www.wa-ms.org/) and Aseanian Membrane Society (AMS, http://www.ams-membrane.net/).

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

We welcome the following recognized researchers, who recently joined the Editorial Board of Membranes:

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

Membranes has been carefully monitoring the situation regarding COVID-19, which is spreading rapidly around the world, leading to further restrictions on scientific conference activities. We have decided to postpone the 2020 Membranes Travel Awards in light of the current coronavirus pandemic. We will continue to monitor the situation closely, and a new schedule for the announcement of winners shall be determined based on how it develops. The application deadline has been provisionally extended to 31 July 2020. For further information, please check it here.

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.

We welcome the following recognized researchers, who recently joined the Editorial Board of Membranes:

If you are interested in serving as an Academic Editor on the Editorial Board, or would like to recommend potential candidates, please reach out to us. To apply or request further information, please contact the Membranes Editorial Office ([email protected])

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.

Membranes is recruiting Editorial Board members for the following five sections:

• Membrane Preparation and Characterization
• Fundamentals of Membrane Processes
• Membrane Engineering and Applications
• Membrane Modeling and Simulation
• Membranes in Life Sciences

The journal is looking to expand the Editorial Board in order to cover areas that need additional representation by the current team. If you are interested in serving as an Academic Editor on the Editorial Board, or would like to recommend potential candidates, please reach out to us.

Membranes (ISSN 2077-0375) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal of membrane science and technology. It enjoys high visibility, since it is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE—Web of Science), Scopus (CiteScore 3.28), Ei Compendex, SciFinder (CAS), Polymer Library and other databases. Citations are available in PubMed, and the full-text is archived in PubMed Central. The first impact factor will be received in June 2020 (JCR—Clarivate Analytics). The website of Membranes is available here.

Editorial Board members have the following responsibilities:

• Make decisions on whether a manuscript should be accepted based on the reports we collect (we will ask you to make decisions for about 5 papers per year).
• Provide suggestions in specific cases (e.g., comment on submissions with two or more different review opinions; respond to requests or questions from external experts).
• Supervise at least one Special Issue related to your research field (you can publish an extra paper for free) every two years.
• Recommend timely topics or appropriate conferences to attend.
• Promote Membranes at conferences that you attend or organize (materials, like flyers or business cards, can be designed and shipped to your office; conference attendees would enjoy special discounts).

To apply or request further information, please contact the Membranes Editorial Office ([email protected]). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

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

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].

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 are glad to report that our title Membranes (ISSN 2077-0375) will be included in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) in the Web of Science Core Collection, as well as "Current Contents - Engineering, Computing & Technology" and "Current Contents - Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences". Moreover, from June 2020 Membranes is going to be listed in the categories of 'Chemical Engineering', 'Materials Science, Multidisciplinary', and 'Polymer Science' in the Journal Citation Reports.

Membranes continues to be edited by Spas Kolev, who is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne. Professor Kolev was the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Membranes in 2010. The journal has since published more than five hundred primary research and review articles on different aspects of membrane technology.

Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Web of Science^TM, Current Contents and Journal Citation Reports are Clarivate Analytics products.

In February 2019, the European Membrane Society (EMS) became affiliated to Membranes. As part of this collaboration, all members of EMS enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) when submitting articles to Membranes.

The European Membrane Society (EMS), founded in 1982, is an international non-profit organization whose aim is to promote cooperation between scientists and engineers involved in Research and Development in the field of synthetic membranes and membrane processes. The society currently has 600+ members from almost 50 countries worldwide. Its main activities are the organization of scientific conferences such as the Euromembrane series, Summer Schools (35 organized so far) and the International Congress on Membranes & Membrane Processes (organized in a carrousel between the European Membrane Society, the North American Membrane Society and the Aseanian Membrane Society). Every year, the society gives an average of 30 000 € to sponsor several scientific conferences by awarding students with travel grants and prizes for best presentations, as well as by offering free conference registration fee to young researchers and a best paper award. The European Membrane Society is also a founding member of the World Association of Membrane Societies.

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/

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.

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].

MDPI will be attending the UDM 2018 (11th International Conference on Urban Drainage Modelling), to be held in Palermo, Italy, 23–26 September 2018.

On behalf of the organizing committee we would like to invite you to Palermo (Italy) for the 11th International Conference on Urban Drainage Modelling (UDM). The conference has been running since 1986 and in 2018 will be held the 11th edition, a monumental achievement of the urban drainage community. In 2018 we will be meeting in Europe once again. The UDM Conference deals with the main and advanced topics related to modelling the urban drainage system (e.g., water quality and quantity, urban flooding and modelling, urban flood forecasting and risk analysis, socio-economic interactions and modelling tools, etc.) by focusing the attention on the interrelationships among the entire water cycle, environment and society. The UDM seeks to create a forum for promoting the discussion amongst scientists, professionals and academia on urban drainage thus providing to women and men of this field decisive ideas.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Water
• Infrastructures
• Climate
• Challenges
• Urban Science
• Membranes

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 hace. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.udm2018.org/

Meet us at the 23rd International Congress of Chemical and Process Engineering (CHISA 2018) and 21st Conference on Process Integration, Modelling and Optimisation for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction (PRES 2018) in Prague, Czech Republic, from 25–29 August 2018.

MDPI will be represented at the CHISA 2018 jointly held with PRES 2018 in Prague, Czech Republic, from 25–29 August 2018.

CHISA 2018 and PRES 2018 will offer you many interdisciplinary connections and cover a range of important topics with focus on addressing global challenges in energy, water, pollution, and sustainability using classical chemical engineering approaches, enhanced by many interdisciplinary collaborations.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Energies
• Processes
• Separations
• Fluids
• Catalysts
• Membranes
• Chemengineering
• Clean Technologies

If you are also attending these two conferences, please stop by our booth at the Clarion Congress Hotel Prague. 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 conferences, please visit http://2018.chisa.cz/.

MDPI will be attending the IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition, to be held in Tokyo, Japan, 16–21 September 2018.

The IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition is the global event for water professionals covering the full water cycle. As the Congress rotates through cities and countries each event has an extra emphasis on issues of specific interest to the region. The 2018 edition taking place in Tokyo will have as key focus the digital economy, megacities, diffusion of innovation, disaster resilience and sustainability.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Water
• Sustainability
• Energies
• Hydrology
• Membranes

We are pleased to report Membranes received a CiteScore of 2.69 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

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.

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/

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

Water is pleased to announce that on November 17, 2017, assistant editor Mary Sue Daoud and Water Editorial Board Member Prof. Dr. Michele Mossa (Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy) gave a joint presentation at the International Water Development Congress and Exhibition in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

After Ms. Daoud’s informative talk on MDPI and the journals Water, Resources, Membranes, Hydrology and Environments that sponsored the exhibition, Dr. Mossa presented his research entitled “The Role of Physical Models and Field Monitoring in Environmental and Maritime Hydraulics” to an attentive audience. In his PowerPoint presentation, Dr. Mossa shared photographs and videos of new innovations taking place at the University of Bari, including a 3D wave basin and an off-shore physical model basin. Additionally, he offered insights into the type of work they are doing and its importance to science today. Their presentations were well received and concluded with more people stopping at the MDPI booth to speak personally with our editors and Prof. Mossa and to express their interest in MDPI and Dr. Mossa’s work.

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 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

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