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

Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X, impact factor 2.426) is launching a new Section “Engineering and Technology” which will cover the following topics:

-Micro/nanofabrication and manufacturing: deposition, lithography, patterning, etching, surface micromachining, bulk micromachining, laser fabrication, biofabrication, 3D printing, self-assembly, etc.;

-Design and optimization principles of micro- and nanosystems;

-Micro/nanosystems and advanced technologies for engineering applications: resources engineering, civil engineering, advanced manufacturing engineering, environmental engineering, bioengineering, electronic systems (including electrical circuits and devices, transistors, capacitors, inductors, resistors, diodes, insulators, and conductors), engineering, etc.

The following Special Issues of this section are currently open for submissions:

• Future Wearable and Implants (Deadline: 30 August 2020)
• 3D Printing of MEMS Technology (Deadline: 31 August 2020)
• Networks-On-Chip Again on the Rise: From Emerging Applications to Emerging Technologies (Deadline: 18 October 2020)
• Micro/Nanodevices and Their Tribology (Deadline: 31 October 2020)
• Optofluidic Microlasers (Deadline: 31 October 2020)
• Miniature Optoelectronic Resonators and Oscillators (Deadline: 31 December 2020)
• Soft Tooling—Polymer Additive Manufacturing Applied to Injection Moulding Process Chains (Deadline: 15 February 2021)
• MEMS Force Sensor (Deadline: 15 March 2021)
• Metal Oxide Gas Sensors: Fundamentals and Applications (Deadline: 15 July 2021)

Micromachines is a peer-reviewed open access journal on the science and technology of small structures, devices, and systems, published monthly online by MDPI.

Benefits of publishing in Micromachines:

-Impact Factor 2.426 (2018 Journal Citation [email protected])

-Rapid Publication: Manuscripts are peer-reviewed, and a first decision provided to authors approximately 13.5 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 1.9 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the second half of 2019)

-Coverage by Leading Indexing Services: SCIE—Science Citation Index Expanded (Clarivate Analytics), Compendex (EI), PubMed (NLM), Scopus (Elsevier)

-Open Access: Unlimited and free access for readers

-No Copyright Constraints: Retain copyright of your work and free use of your article

-No Space Constraints, No Extra Space or Color Charges: No restriction on the length of the papers, number of figures, or use of color

-Discounts for Exceptional and Professional Service: The article processing charge (APC) for each accepted paper is 1600 CHF. You may be entitled to a discount if you have previously received a discount code.

If you are interested in publishing a paper, please feel free to contact us ([email protected]) or you may submit your paper directly here. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions.

We look forward to collaborating with you.

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

Scholarly Community—Encyclopedia

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

Comprehensive and Free Literature Database—Scilit

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

Display Academic Achievements—SciProfiles

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

Organize and Participate in Conferences Online—Sciforum

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

Post Early Versions of Research Outputs—Preprints

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the position paper here

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

Prize for Winners

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

Application Deadline

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

Candidate Requirements

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

Evaluation Standards

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

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

Micromachines established the Best Paper Award to recognize its best published papers in Volume 9 (between 21 December 2017 and 19 December 2018). Nominations are selected by the Editorial Office of Micromachines based on the review reports. All research articles and review papers published in Volume 9 are eligible for consideration.

The Evaluation Committee consisted of 42 Editorial Board Members chaired by the Section Editor-in-Chief, Professor Ai-Qun Liu. Each paper nominated was examined carefully before the decision was made for the Micromachines Best Paper Award 2019. Congratulations to the authors of the three winning papers:

• Li, X.; Mou, F.; Guo, J.; Deng, Z.; Chen, C.; Xu, L.; Luo, M.; Guan, J. Hydrophobic Janus Foam Motors: Self-Propulsion and On-The-Fly Oil Absorption. Micromachines 2018, 9, 23; doi.org/10.3390/mi9010023. Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-666X/9/1/23
• Yoon, D.H.; Tanaka, D.; Sekiguchi, T.; Shoji, S. Size-Dependent and Property-Independent Passive Microdroplet Sorting by Droplet Transfer on Dot Rails. Micromachines 2018, 9, 513; doi.org/10.3390/mi9100513. Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-666X/9/10/513
• Stier, A.; Halekote, E.; Mark, A.; Qiao, S.; Yang, S.; Diller, K.; Lu, N. Stretchable Tattoo-Like Heater with On-Site Temperature Feedback Control. Micromachines 2018, 9, 170; doi.org/10.3390/mi9040170. Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-666X/9/4/170

In recognition of their accomplishments, each Best Paper Award winner will be given a certificate, a cash award of 500 CHF, and an opportunity to publish a paper in Micromachines free of charge (equivalent to 1600 CHF) in Open Access format after the standard peer-review process.

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

MDPI will be attending the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco, USA, 7–11 December 2019

IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is the world’s preeminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and device modeling and simulation.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Electronics
• JSAN
• Energies
• Micromachines
• Sensors
• Biosensors

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://ieee-iedm.org/.

On behalf of the Editors-in-Chief, we wish to acknowledge all those who have generously dedicated their time and efforts in reviewing manuscripts submitted to Micromachines by launching the Micromachines Outstanding Reviewer Award. We have created this award to recognize those who have exhibited dedication, professionalism, and timeliness when reviewing manuscripts. Anonymous peer reviewing helps to ensure the quality and integrity of scholarly communication. The Micromachines Editorial Office is extremely grateful to reviewers for the time and energy that they dedicate to peer reviews.

What are the eligibility requirements for the Micromachines Outstanding Reviewer Award 2019?

• All reviewers of Micromachines in 2019 will automatically be included for consideration.

What are the evaluation standards?

• The number of manuscript reviews, timeliness, and quality of their reviews will be taken into consideration.

What will the winners receive?

There will be four awardees, and each will receive:

• A certificate;
• 500 CHF (Swiss Francs).

When will the winners be announced?

• The winners will be announced on the journal website at the end of March 2020.

How do you ensure you have a chance to win in the future?

• If you are an expert in micromachines or a related field, and have not yet reviewed papers for Micromachines but would like to, you can easily register to be a reviewer at https://susy.mdpi.com/volunteer/profile/edit.

We are pleased to announce that the application period is now open for the 2020 Micromachines Young Investigator Award. This prize will be given to a young investigator in recognition of her/his excellence in the research field of micro/nano sciences, devices and applications. All nominations will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee led by the Editors-in-Chief.

The award will consist of:

– 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs);
– An offer to publish one paper free of charge and without a fixed deadline in Micromachines (after peer review);
– An engraved plaque.

The requirements for candidate participation and nomination materials are available here.

We will be attending the 23rd International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences (MicroTAS 2019), to be held at Congress Center Basel, in Basel, Switzerland, on 27–31 October 2019. MicroTAS 2019 represents the continuation of a series of conferences that are considered the premier forum for presenting the latest research in microfluidics, microfabrication, nanotechnology, integration, materials and surfaces, analysis and synthesis, and detection technologies for life science and chemistry. MicroTAS 2019 offers plenary talks as well as contributed oral presentations and posters from selected abstracts. The following open-access journals will be represented:

Micromachines
Biosensors
Coatings
Applied Sciences
IJMS
Sensors

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (booth #21). 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://microtas2019.org.

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].

With our inaugural Issue published in 2010, 2019 marks Micromachines tenth anniversary. To acknowledge the authors’ support and recognize their outstanding scientific accomplishment, the editorial board is proud to announce the Micromachines Best Paper Award 2019. We hope this award will encourage the publishing of high-quality papers in the journal.

All papers published in Volume 9 (between 21 December 2017 and 19 December 2018) are eligible to compete for the award. The award committee, which is composed of Micromachines editorial board members, will carefully evaluate the papers according to the rigor of science, the significant contribution to the field, and the originality of the work. Three articles will be selected for the award.

Eligibility for the awards:
Both original research articles and review articles published in Volume 9 of Micromachines.

Selection criteria:
–– Editors seek to recognize innovative or creative papers, with transparent, reproducible, rigorous, and relevant science. The quality and clarity of the presentation will be considered, as well as the potential impact of the paper on its field;
–– Open to all age groups and career levels;
–– Editors will nominate papers for consideration according to the following criteria:
• Scientific rigor;
• Significance;
• Originality.

Prizes:
Three final winners will be selected for the Micromachines Best Paper Award 2019. Each winner will receive a certificate, a cash award of 500 CHF, and an opportunity to publish a paper in Micromachines free of charge (a value of 1400 CHF).

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

Micromachines, MDPI’s open access journal on all aspects of micro/nanoscaled structures, materials, devices, systems, and their applications, has published more than 2000 articles and reviews since its inception in 2010. Micromachines is now covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science), Scopus, EI, and PubMed, with a 2018 Impact Factor of 2.426. The journal ranks 25/61 (Q2) in ‘Instruments & Instrumentation’ and 55/94 (Q3) in ‘Nanoscience & Nanotechnology’ in the Journal Citation Reports.

Our sincerest thanks go to the Editor-in-Chief of Micromachines, Prof. Ai Qun Liu, Prof. Nam-Trung Nguyen, Prof. Mehmet Remzi Dokmeci, and all the Editorial Board members, as well as to Guest Editors of Special Issues, who have ensured the continued success of the journal, through their hard work and diligence.

We are pleased to inform that Micromachines received an updated Journal Impact Factor of 2.426 in the recent release of the Journal Citation Reports®. The journal's 5-Year Impact Factor is 2.480. Micromachines now ranks 55/94 (Q3) in the category 'Nanoscience & Nanotechnology' and 25/61 (Q2) in 'Instruments & Instrumentation.'

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Micromachines:

Source: data according to Journal Citation Reports®, 2018 release, a Clarivate Analytics product.

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

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

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Nanomaterials

Micromachines

Safety

Coatings

Biosensors

Applied Sciences

Chemosensors

Electronics

Energies

Materials

Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing

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

We 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 Martyn Rittman ([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 will attend the 32nd International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS 2019). It will be held in Seoul, Korea, 27–31 January 2019, and it will be organized by the society of Micro and Nano Systems (SMNS). MEMS 2019 is one of the premier annual events reporting research results on every aspect of microsystems technology. This conference reflects from the rapid proliferation of the commitment and success of the microsystems research community. In recent years, the IEEE MEMS Conference has attracted more than 700 participants and 800+ abstract submissions and has created a forum to present over 200 select papers in podium and poster/oral sessions. Representatives of the following open-access journals will attend:

Micromachines

Technologies

Chemosensors

Energies

Applied Sciences

Sensors

Fluids

J – Journal of Multidisciplinary Science

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (booth #40). 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://mems19.org/html/main.php.

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

Metals

Materials

Coatings

Applied Sciences

Nanomaterials

Micromachines

Journal of Composites Science

Energies

QuBS

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

Our editors and colleagues are attending the 22nd International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences (µTAS 2018). The conference is being held at the Kaohsiung Exhibition Center in Kaohsiung, Taiwan from 11 to 15 November 2018, organized by the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society (CBMS).

µTAS 2018 continues a series of Conferences that are the premier forum for reporting research results in microfluidics, microfabrication, nanotechnology, integration, materials and surfaces, analysis and synthesis, and detection technologies for life science and chemistry. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Micromachines

Applied Sciences

International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS)

Sensors

Biosensors

Technologies

Diagnostics

Journal of Multidisciplinary Science (J)

If you're attending the conference too, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #350). 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://cbmsociety.org/conferences/microtas2018/

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].

We are pleased to inform that Micromachines received an updated Journal Impact Factor of 2.222 in the June 2018 release of the Journal Citation Reports®. The journal's 5-Year Impact Factor is 2.236. Micromachines now ranks 56/92 (Q3) in the category 'Nanoscience & Nanotechnology' and 22/61 (Q2) in 'Instruments & Instrumentation.'

Overview of Citation Metrics:

• Journal Impact Factor, 2 yrs (2017): 2.222
• 5-Year Impact Factor (2017): 2.236
• CiteScore, 3 yrs (Scopus): 2.31
• SJR Scimago Journal Rank 2017(SJR): 0.493
• Source Normalized Impact 2017 (SNIP): 0.987

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Micromachines:

We are pleased to report Micromachines received a CiteScore of 2.31 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.

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

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

We will be attending the 31st IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS 2018) (http://www.mems2018.org/). The MEMS 2018 will bring together academics from all over the world to one meeting covering on every aspect of Microsystems technology. This conference reflects from the rapid proliferation of the commitment and success of the microsystems research community. Its single-session format provides ample opportunity for interaction between attendees, presenters and exhibitors. Representatives of the following open access journals will attend:

Sensors
Micromachines
Machines
Actuators
Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing (JMMP)

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #9). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.mems2018.org/.

Conference Location:

Belfast Waterfront
2 Lanyon Place
Belfast BT1 3WH
UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We offer a warm welcome to the new participants!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full interview here.

We will be attending the MicroTAS 2017, a series of Conferences that are the premier forum for reporting research results in microfluidics, microfabrication, nanotechnology, integration, materials and surfaces, analysis and synthesis, and detection technologies for life science and chemistry. It will be held at the Savannah International Trade and Conference Center in Savannah, Georgia, USA from October 22–26, 2017, representing the following MDPI open access journals:

Micromachines
Sensors
Diagnostics
Biosensors
Technologies
Applied Sciences

Please visit our stand ((booth number: #6) to chat about our journals with our delegates. We look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.microtas2017.org.

Conference Location

Savannah International Trade & Convention Center
1 International Drive
Savannah, Georgia 31402
USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Micromachines:

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

Applied Sciences
Materials
Technologies
Photonics
Micromachines

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

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

Conference date:
June 25–-29 2017

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

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

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

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

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

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce the Featured Journal of this Month— Nanomaterials.

Nanomaterials is an Open Access Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Journal, published monthly by MDPI. Since it was founded in 2011, 598 articles have been published, 65 of them cited 10 times or more (h-10 index). The current Impact Factor is 2.690, and the five-year impact factor is 3.176.

For more information, also check out our special issues, currently open for submissions and our MDPI-Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Access the live tracker on published articles here.

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

For more information, see the editorial here.

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

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

For more information please see:

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

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

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

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

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

Here are some pictures from the forum so far:

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts:

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

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

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#WSF2017SA

MDPI is now a proud supporter of the OA2020 Initiative.

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

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

For more information please see here.

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

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

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

Conference details:

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

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

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

Season's greetings from everyone at MDPI!

We are pleased to announce that the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Germany and the University of California, Berkeley, USA, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

The Wellcome Trust has, for a number of years, required that the results of its funded projects are published in open access format. Recently it announced criteria that publishers must fulfil for publication fees to be paid by the Trust. MDPI is pleased to have been added to the list of compliant publishers.

Only publishers who have confirmed their compliance by 16 December 2016 will be eligible to receive payment of APCs by the Wellcome Trust as of 1 April 2017. For more information on the criteria and a full list of publishers that meet them, see here.

MDPI is currently attending the 2016 AGU Fall Meeting (12–16 December, 2016)

If you are also attending the conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #1147) and meet the representative editors.

Conference details:

2016 AGU Fall Meeting
12–16 December 2016
Moscone Center
747 Howard St
San Francisco, CA 94103, USA

We are pleased to announce that Purdue University, USA, the Universitat Politécnica de Valencia, Spain and the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

The deadline for the World Sustainability Award has been extended for one last time! You now have one more month to nominate an individual researcher, group or project! The final deadline for nominations will be December 15, 2016. 

For full details, please visit here.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Minnesota, USA, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

MDPI has become a member of the United Nations Global Compact to support corporate sustainability and have committed ourselves to the ten principles associated with the Compact.

Sustainability has always been at the core of MDPI’s values, starting with the collection and preservation of rare chemical samples that started in 1996 and led to the first journal, Molecules. Sustainability has become one of our flagship journals and we have supported and organized several conferences and events based on Sustainability, including the upcoming 6th World Sustainability Forum. As a global enterprise, we see it as our duty to promote responsible practices that will ensure a bright future for our planet. Given this, the choice to join the Global Compact was an easy one and we will do our utmost to fully implement it.

We are delighted to announce that MDPI has become a member of SPARC Europe, an organization that works for open scholarship in Europe, including support of open access publication.

As one of the few publishers to join SPARC Europe to date, MDPI looks forward to making a contribution that puts open scholarship on a positive and sustainable path. We fully support the goals of open scholarship that allow the largest number of people possible to benefit from work of researchers in all disciplines. We hope that our membership will enable us to work with other stakeholders to find the best possible solution.

The deadline for the World Sustainability Award has been extended! You now have until November 15, 2016 to nominate an individual researcher, group or project!

For full details, please visit here.

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We are pleased to announce that the Wuppertal Institut, Germany, the University of Girona, Spain and Central South University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

Meet us during International Open Access Week 2016! We will be presenting at various locations in Europe and China. 

To get involved and for full details see the complete list of events organised by MDPI here.

We are pleased to announce that the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain and Aalto University, Finland, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the Iowa State University and the University of North Texas, USA, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

Meet MDPI during the Open Access Days held from 10-11 October 2016 at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. 

The two-day event will feature experts from the open access sector, scientists from all disciplines, publishing representatives and supporters of scientific research and communication from libraries as well as research institutes and funding institutions. Join us!

For more information about the event and to see the program, visit the event webpage.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Sevilla and the University of Alicante, Spain have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Delaware, USA, has joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from this university will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

As an open access publisher indebted to the work of our peer reviewers, we are proud to support Peer Review Week 2016. As part of the week's activities and to celebrate this year's theme "Recognition for Review", MDPI will host two webinars that anyone can join.

These webinars will explore the role and value of reviewers and the recognition they receive from a publishers perspective, with examples from MDPI's experience in publishing nearly 80,000 peer reviewed papers, along with evidence from reviewer surveys. It will also touch upon potential changes in how review is carried out and tips for early career researchers who want to be involved in the review process.

Details and links to join can be found below:

Wednesday September 21, 08:00 (CEST)

Friday September 23, 16:00 (CEST)

For more information about all the activites taking place, please visit the Peer Review Week website.

We are pleased to announce that Kansas State University and Northwestern Universty, USE, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that University College Cork, Ireland, has joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from this university will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that MDPI has now moved to a new permanent address:

MDPI AG
St. Alban Anlage 66
CH-4052 Basel
Postfach, CH-4020 Basel
Switzerland

Telephone and fax numbers remain unchanged.

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program in August 2016:

• University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland
• University of Granada, Spain
• Compultense University of Madrid, Spain

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program in July 2016:

• Louisiana State University, USA
• Florida State University, USA
• Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland
• University of Rostock, Germany
• AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
• Southeast University, China

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

As of 20 August 2016, MDPI's new address in Basel will be:

MDPI AG
St. Alban-Anlage 66
CH-4052 Basel
Switzerland

Telephone and fax numbers remain unchanged.

St. Alban-Anlage 66 was built from 1947 to 1948 and initially the home of the "Bühler AG", a book printing business. 

From the 15-16 September, 2016, MDPI will run a course on Academic Publishing at the University of Basel.

In this two day workshop, MDPI will look in detail at the role performed by academic journal publishers and how they interact with academics. Ethical dimensions, what happens when problems occur and how the publisher coordinates all aspects of the submission process will also be covered. 

For more detailed information about the program, trainers and registration please visit the course webpage.

We are pleased to report the 2015 Journal Impact Factors in the latest Journal Citation Reports® Science Edition, published by Thomson Reuters in June 2016. Twenty out of 25 journals have seen an increase in their Impact Factor and two journals (Crystals and IJGI) received a first Impact Factor. Coatings was recently added to SCIE and will receive its first Impact Factor in next year’s JCR.

Updated Impact Factors for Journals in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)

Journals with First Impact Factors

We are pleased to inform you that the new Impact Factor of Micromachines has been released. According to the Journal Citation Reports®, published by Thomson Reuters in June 2016, the new Impact Factor is 1.295, and the 5-Year Impact Factor is 1.860.

Micromachines now ranks 63/83 (Q4) in the category ‘Nanoscience & Nanotechnology’ and 30/56 (Q3) in the category ‘Instruments & Instrumentation.

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Micromachines:

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program in May 2016:

• Unversity of Bremen, Germany
• Koç University, Turkey
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria
• Jilin University, China
• Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program in April and May 2016:

• KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• South China University of Technology, China
• Beijing University of Technology, China
• Southern Medical University, China

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

You may have noticed a new section that is now visible on our home page. This section is called "Latest Books" and showcases recent publications from MDPI Books, our book publishing service.

By clicking on the hyperlink "More Books" you will be taken to the MDPI Books Home Page. There you will find more information about the service, as well as the "Recent Publications" list. 

Clicking on any of the book images in this list will take you to detailed information about that book (shown below). Here you can also download a PDF version of the book, or order a hardcover printed copy.

For further information about the MDPI Books service, please visit the webpage or contact [email protected].

We are pleased to announce that the journals Axioms, Behavioral Sciences, Photonics, Separations and Toxics were recently accepted for inclusion in the newly launched Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in Web of Science.

ESCI serves to highlight promising journals which are still under consideration for the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) or the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).

The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index
(SSCI), and Web of Science™ (WoS) are Thomson Reuters products.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Winchester, UK, the Silesian University of Technology, Poland and Beijing Jiaotong University and Zhejiang University, China, have joined our Institutional Membership program. Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are excited to announce the opening of our new editorial office in Barcelona, Spain. The launch team is led by a Senior Editor and comprises further staff holding doctoral degrees with several years of research experience. The new editorial team will help us to get closer to European research communities and progress Sciforum, the platform to support the scientific community via conference hosting and other functions. They will also help spread the word about Open Access and meet academics at scientific events.

We are in the process of hiring more doctoral and masters graduates to join the editorial team and welcome applications via [email protected]. For contact details about the office, see our contact page.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Nam-Trung Nguyen has been appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X). His appointment will start on 1 March 2016.

Nam-Trung Nguyen, Ph.D., is a Professor at the Griffith University, Australia and the Director of Queensland Micro- and Nanotechnology Centre. He received his Dip-Ing, Dr Ing and Dr Ing Habil degrees from Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, in 1993, 1997 and 2004, respectively. In 1998, he was appointed as a postdoctoral research engineer at Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, University of California at Berkeley, USA. From 1999 to 2013, he worked as an Associate Professor with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Prof. Nguyen was runner-up of the Inaugural ProSPER.Net–Scopus Young Scientist Awards in Sustainable Development in 2009 and the runner-up of the ASAIHL–Scopus Young Scientist Awards in 2008. He is a Fellow of ASME and a Member of IEEE. His research is focused on microfluidics, nanofluidics, micro/nanomachining technologies, micro/nanoscale science, and instrumentation for biomedical applications. He has published over 230 journal papers, nine books and hold three patents.

Prof. Nguyen takes over from Prof. Miko Elwenspoek, who has held the position since the journal started six years ago. During the tenure of Prof. Elwenspoek, the journal has had great success, seeing a sustained increase in both the number of publications and the journal impact. We are extremely grateful to Prof. Elwenspoek for his hard work and support in growing the journal to its current state.

Having already served Guest Editor of two Special Issues for the journal and regularly been involved in the editorial process, Prof. Nguyen is familiar with the journal and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience.

We would like to warmly welcome Prof. Nguyen as Editor-in-Chief and look forward to his contributing to the continued success of Micromachines.

We are pleased to announce that the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) has signed an agreement with MDPI to support authors associated with the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft). As of 22 February 2016, corresponding authors will receive full funding from the MPDL for articles published in MDPI journals, with a 10% discount applied to the Article Processing Charges. Additional details can be found at our institutional membership page.

Founded in 1948, The Max Planck Society is one of Germany’s leading research organizations, and is currently made up of 83 institutes conducting basic research in natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences and humanities. 18 Nobel laureates have emerged from its ranks of scientists and the society has more than 15,000 publications in scientific journals each year.

We are pleased to announce that Wageningen University, the Netherlands, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain, the University of Zürich and ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and the University of Tübingen and Osnabrück University, Germany, have not only renewed their institutional memberships with MDPI after two years of successful cooperation, but have also increased the reduction of the article processing charges (APCs) for affiliated authors to 25%.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that Brock University, Cananda, and the University of Pisa, Italy, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these universities will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges as of 01 February 2016. 

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

MDPI is pleased to announce its newly established sponsorship of diss:kurs, an event coordinated by the University of Basel to support their doctorate program. For more information about the event and how to register, please visit the diss:kurs webpage.

We are pleased to announce that the following institutions have joined MDPI's institutional membership program as of 1 January 2016:

• Tsinghua University, China
• Chinese Society of Micro-Nano Technology (CSMNT)
• Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
• University of Ulm, Germany

Authors affiliated with these institutions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that MDPI's open access journals Safety, Journal of Imaging, Fermentation, C-Journal of Carbon Research, Magnetochemistry, Batteries and Horticulturae released their first issue at the end of December 2015.

Season's greetings from everyone at MDPI!

We are pleased to announce that the University of Bern, Switzerland has not only renewed their institutional membership with MDPI after two years of successful cooperation, but also increased the reduction of the article processing charges (APCs) for affiliated authors to 25%.

We are pleased to announce that University of Ulm, Germany and Helmholtz Zentrum Munich, Germany has joined MDPI's institutional membership program:

Primary authors from the University of Ulm and Helmholtz Zentrum Munich will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges as of 1 January 2016. Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that Virginia Tech has joined MDPI's institutional membership program. Authors from Virginia Tech will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges as of 1 December 2015. Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have joined MDPI's institutional membership program:

• Technical University of Denmark (as of 1 November 2015)
• University of North Florida, USA (as of 15 November 2015)

Primary authors from the Technical University of Denmark and the University of North Florida will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have joined MDPI's institutional membership program:

University of Freiburg, Germany
University of Regensburg, Germany

Primary authors from the University of Freiburg and the University of Regensburg will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges as of 1 October 2015 and 1 November 2015.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

The 2014 Impact Factors have been recently released. According to the 2015 release of the Journal Citation Reports® Science Edition (published by Thomson Reuters in June 2015), the updated Impact Factor for Micromachines is 1.269. The 5-Year Impact Factor is 1.627. Micromachines now ranks 30/56 (Q3) in the category ‘Instruments & Instrumentation’ and 60/79 (Q4) in the category ‘Nanoscience & Nanotechnology’.

Evolution of the Micromachines Impact Factor:

Evolution of citations to Micromachines: