Announcements

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Materials
• Energies
• Metals
• Gels
• Technologies

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

We are delighted to invite you to join the 1st International Electronic Conference on Metallurgy and Metals (IEC2M 2021). I hope you will agree to take part in this conference, which will enable you to share and discuss your most recent research findings with the vibrant worldwide community of scientists and technologists in the field.

IEC2M 2021 will revolutionize dissemination in the field with “MDPI Sciforum” for sharing research in an online environment that will preserve the same standards and structure as expected of traditional conferences but will be more inclusive by breaking the cost and time barriers that prevent participation in international conferences.

IEC2M 2021 will make your presentation accessible to hundreds of researchers worldwide, with the active engagement of the audience in question and answer sessions and discussion groups that will take place online. I hope you will join us in presenting your work and taking part in this thriving online experience.

Submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the conference committee. The authors of accepted contributions will be invited to produce an extended abstract for the conference proceedings along with a slide presentation of their work. Following the conference, outstanding contributions will be invited to be submitted for publication in Metals.

This conference will address a variety of research topics, which reflect some of the current areas of focus. These are organized into 8 sessions, and include:

• Topic A: Hydrometallurgy/Pyrometallurgy;
• Topic B: Powder Metallurgy
• Topic C: Corrosion and Protection
• Topic D: Biobased and Biodegradable Metals
• Topic E: Metal Forming
• Topic F: Additive Manufacturing
• Topic G: Metal Failure
• Topic H: Metal Recycling.

Important Dates

• Abstract Deadline: 7 December 2020
• Abstract Acceptance Notification Deadline: 17 December 2020
• Full Paper Submission Deadline: 7 February 2021
• Conference Date: 22 February-7 March 2021
• Awards Announcement: 22 April 2021

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions.

We look forward to welcoming you at this exciting meeting online.

https://iec2m.sciforum.net/

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 great pleasure to announce the winners of Metals 2019 Highly Cited Paper Award to recognize the most highly cited paper in the past three years. The prize started in the middle of 2020 and it has been awarded three winners.

There papers have been selected for this award assessed by the Editorial Office of Metals from the papers published in 2017 and 2018. The paper citation data are based on citations in Web of Science in 2019.

1st Prize (with 42 citations)
Corrosion-Resistant High-Entropy Alloys: A Review
Yunzhu Shi, Bin Yang, and Peter K. Liaw
Metals 2017, 7, 42; doi:10.3390/met7020043
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/7/2/43

“The paper ‘Corrosion-Resistant High-Entropy Alloys: A Review’ summarizes the investigation of the corrosion characteristics of high-entropy alloys (HEAs) during the last decade. The corrosion resistance of HEAs in various aqueous environments and the corrosion behavior of HEAs coatings are presented. Furthermore, the possible directions of future work regarding the corrosion study of HEAs are suggested.

It was a very pleasant experience to publish the present work with the cooperation of Metals. Hopefully, more and more influential articles will be published in Metals in the future.”

2nd Prize (with 22 citations)
The Prospects of Zinc as a Structural Material for Biodegradable Implants—A Review Paper
Galit Katarivas Levy, Jeremy Goldman, and Eli Aghion
Metals 2017, 7, 402; doi:10.3390/met7100402
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/7/10/402

“The past several years has seen rapid growth in research and development of zinc-based medical devices due to its biological and biodegradability properties that match the human body. Zn is one of the most abundant essential elements in the human body, playing essential roles in human health. Additionally, zinc overcomes many limitations inherent to iron and magnesium, both pure and alloyed. This paper provides an extensive literature review on the current research progress for zinc and the development of zinc-based alloys. We comprehensively summarized and compared between pure zinc and the currently researched zinc alloys in aspects such as biocompatibility, corrosion behavior and mechanical properties. We highlighted the important role of zinc in the human body, along with the side-effects of zinc deficiency and excess and we broadly discussed the degradation model of zinc in the physiological environment as a result of the corrosion process.

We appreciate being able to work with a high quality professional team at Metals, who rapidly moved us through the review and proof correction process.”

3rd Prize (with 18 citations)
A Review of Metastable Beta Titanium Alloys
Prakash Kolli and Arun Devaraj
Metals 2018, 8, 506; doi:10.3390/met8070506
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/8/7/506

“In this article, we provide a broad and extensive review of beta titanium alloys. Beta titanium alloys are an important class of alloys that have found use in demanding applications such as aircraft structures and engines, and orthopedic and orthodontic implants. The advantages of these alloys include their high strength, good corrosion resistance, excellent biocompatibility, and ease of fabrication compared to other high performance alloys. The ease of fabrication, which is due to their lower beta transus temperature, provides these alloys with an advantage compared to other Ti alloy classes. The authors would like to thank the Metals journal for the excellent experience during the editorial and publication process.”

These three outstanding papers are valuable contributions to Metals. On behalf of the Editorial Board and Editorial Office, we would like to congratulate these three teams for their excellent work. In recognition of their accomplishment, the first prize team will be granted 600 CHF, the second prize team will be granted 400 CHF, and the third prize team will be granted 300 CHF.

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 helen.dobson@jisc.ac.uk.

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 ioap@mdpi.com.

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

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

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

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

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

Scholarly Community—Encyclopedia

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

Comprehensive and Free Literature Database—Scilit

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

Display Academic Achievements—SciProfiles

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

Organize and Participate in Conferences Online—Sciforum

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

Post Early Versions of Research Outputs—Preprints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the position paper here