Announcements

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 ioap@mdpi.com.

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 help@jisc.ac.uk. For any queries about MDPI’s institutional agreements and collaborations, you may get in touch with MDPI’s Institutional Engagement team at ioap@mdpi.com, 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 Dr. Constanze Schelhorn (constanze.schelhorn@mdpi.com).

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.