Announcements

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 office@encyclopedia.pub.

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.