Announcements

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: office@encyclopedia.pub)

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.com

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 office@encyclopedia.pub.