Announcements

We will be attending the 23rd Semiconductor Physics Conference (SPC 2021), which is to be held in Xi'an, China, on 8–11 July 2021. The topics of SPC 2021 include semiconductor quantum computing, semiconductor spin physics, semiconductor surface physics, quantum information, wide-bandgap semiconductor physics, etc. The purpose is to support and lead the development of multidisciplinary information, energy, life and materials. The following open access journals will be represented:

Micromachines;
Electronics;
Applied Sciences;
Nanomaterials;
Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications;
Technologies;
Condensed Matter;
Photonics;
Energies.

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth #27. Our delegates are looking forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have.

For more information about the conference, please visit https://www.spcmeeting2021.org/.

We are pleased to announce that seven new scholars were recently appointed as Editorial Board Members for the journal Micromachines:

Dr. Francesca Bragheri (Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie (IFN)-CNR, Italy)
Prof. Dr. Laurent A. Francis (Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium)
Prof. Dr. Attila Gáspár (University of Debrecen, Hungary)
Dr. Hae-Jin Kim (Gyeongsang National University, Gyeongsangnam-do, Korea)
Dr. Jin-yuan Qian (Zhejiang University, China)
Dr. Ali Soltani (University of Lille, France)
Prof. Dr. Chaoyong Yang (Xiamen University, China)

We wish them every success in both their research and development of the journal.
Further details about the Editorial Board can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/micromachines/editors.

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

Selections

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

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

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

Special Issue Reprints

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

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

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

Why choose MDPI Books?

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

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

Contact: Laura Wagner, MDPI Books Manager (email)

Peer review is an essential part of the publication process, ensuring that Micromachines maintains high quality standards for its published papers. As such, the Micromachines Editorial Board and Editorial Team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy given by reviewers in checking manuscripts submitted to the journal. 

The following reviewers have been selected to receive the “Micromachines 2020 Outstanding Reviewer Award” based on the quantity, timelines, and quality of their reviews in Micromachines. 

	Prof. Dr. Khashayar Khoshmanesh Affiliation: School of Engineering, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Research Interests: microfluidics; lab-on-a-chip; organ-on-a-chip; mechano-biology; soft matter
	Dr. Nathan Lazarus Affiliation: US Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, USA Research Interests: 3D printing; stretchable electronics; self-folding origami
	Prof. Dr. Ion Stiharu Affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Concordia University, Quebec, Canada Research Interests: microsystems; sensing (inertial, flow, load, strain); design of MEMS; data processing; modeling of coupled micro and macro systems; packaging of microsensors; MEMS for turbulence control; microfabrication; non-conventional microfabrication; rapid prototyping; migration from auto to aero; reliability of MEMS; failure models; test methodologies
	Dr. Yi Zhang Affiliation: School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Research Interests: micro/nanomedicine; microfluidics; diagnostics; bio-sensing; nanomaterials

 We sincerely congratulate the winners and acknowledge their support of Micromachines. We wish them the best in their future research and careers. 

For more information about Micromachines awards, please visit mdpi.com/journal/micromachines/awards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself to the readers?

My name is Junsuk Rho, I am currently a Mu-Eun-Jae endowed chair Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Chemical Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), South Korea.

2. What does your current research involve, and why did you choose this research field?

My research is focused on developing novel nanophotonic materials and devices based on fundamental physics and experimental studies of deep sub-wavelength light-matter interactions. Specifically, I am working on metamaterials, plasmonics, photonic crystals, topological photonics. Recently, the wavelength regime has expanded to longer wavelengths, such as acoustic and elastic frequencies. I saw the news that an invisibility cloak may be creating through the application of metamaterials. This is the reason why I want to study this for my Ph.D. Such metamaterials will be able to realize invisibility cloaks, super-resolution imaging, acoustic black holes, hologram displays and so on.

3. Which research topics do you think will be of particular interest to the research community in the coming years?

Quantum optics, flexible opto-electronics, photonic chips for diagnostics, and single-digit-nanometer fabrication to overcome the current semiconductor industry problems.

4. Have you ever encountered any difficulties when conducting research? If so, how did you overcome them?

Everyday... this is related to question number five. Have patience, persevere with the research until you make a breakthrough, try not to become depressed and frustrated with your research if things do not go as planned first time around.

5. What qualities do you think young scientists need?

Patience, a positive mind for failure (e.g., individuals who do not let the failure of experiments depress or frustrate them, but instead try the same thing the next day!), and people who keep up to date with the current scientific trends.

6. Micromachines is an Open Access journal. How do you think Open Access impacts the authors? 

Open access journals allow more readers to read the papers, which is extremely helpful in sharing the result with different communities. However, with the limited funding (especially for junior researchers), it can sometimes become a burden. So, support for junior researchers is necessary. In terms of this, MDPI does a very good job in providing financial support and waiving fees for junior researchers.

Prof. Dr. Wei Gao, Editorial Board Member of Micromachines, has recently been recognized as a Clarivate Analytics 2020 Highly Cited Researcher. This corresponds to the top 1% of the most-cited researchers for that publication year.

Prof. Wei Gao received his B.S. degree from Huazhong University of Science & Technology in 2007, M.S. degree from Tsinghua University in 2009, and Ph.D. degree from University of California San Diego in 2014. He has been an Assistant Professor of Medical Engineering at Caltech since 2017.

Professor Gao’s primary research interest is the development of novel bioelectronic devices for personalized and precision medicine: wearable and flexible biosensors that can analyze various biomarkers in body fluids for real-time continuous health monitoring and early diagnosis, and synthetic micro/nanomachines for rapid drug delivery and precision surgery. His study include fundamental materials innovation as well as practical device and system-level applications in translational medicine.

Prof. Dr. Jingshan Luo, Editorial Board Member of Micromachines, has recently been recognized as a Clarivate Analytics 2020 Highly Cited Researcher. This corresponds to the top 1% of the most cited researchers for that publication year.

Prof. Jingshan Luo is a Full Professor and Vice Director of the Institute of Photoelectronic Thin Film Devices and Technology at Nankai University. He received his B.S. degree from Jilin University in 2010 and his Ph.D. degree from Nanyang Technological University in 2014. He went to École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland for postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Prof. Michael Grätzel, where he led the solar fuel subgroup. In 2018, he joined Nankai University.

Professor Luo has authored/co-authored 1 book chapter and more than 80 peer-reviewed publications in Science, Nature Energy, Nature Catalysis, and other journals in the field, which have garnered more than 12,000 literature citations and an h-index of 50 (Google Scholar). He is listed as one of 35 Innovators under 35 years old in China by the MIT Technology Review and 2018 and 2019 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics. He is a recipient of the Marie Curie Fellowship, the Clariant Cleantech Award (First Prize), the E-MRS Young Scientist Award, and the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad.

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

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

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

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

The Coalition is committed to:

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

At MDPI we have slightly revised the layout for articles to be published in the 2021 Volume, starting at the end of December 2020. As of today, the article templates available for download on ‘Instructions for Authors’ pages have been updated.

The most noticeable change can be found on the first page of the article, where a left-hand column has been created to include the following front matter elements: (i) the recommended citation style for the article, (ii) the publishing history, (iii) as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license used (iv) a standard note regarding affiliations. At the same time, the extra spacing on the left means the authors’ affiliations are now more clearly set apart than before. Other front matter key elements such as journal logo, article type, article title, authors, abstract and keywords remain unchanged.

The blank column on the left runs through all pages in an article; as a result, the main text is slightly more condensed, which improve reader friendliness for smaller screens. Small figures/tables are aligned on the left with standard indenture, while large figures/tables are centered and covering the full width of the page. The revised layout was applied in the article pictured below, to serve as an example:

1) Information is displayed in the left information bar.

2) In the main text, there is a blank column on the left.

3) Small tables/figures are aligned on the left, large tables/figures are centered.