Announcements

As a leading open access publisher, MDPI provides scholars with a high-quality and rich academic exchange platform by continuously expanding into new and exciting research areas.

In December 2022, MDPI launched five new journals, covering multiple subjects such as life sciences, biology, medicine and pharmacology, social sciences and humanities. These new journals are being edited by established scholars across the world.

If you are interested in creating more open access journals with us to publish cutting-edge research, please send your journal proposal application to newjournal-committee@mdpi.com.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Riccardo Frisenda has been appointed Associate Editor of Nanomanufacturing (ISSN: 2673-687X).

Dr. Riccardo Frisenda received his Ph.D. degree from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Delft, the Netherlands, in 2016. Currently, he is on the tenure track at Sapienza University, Rome, Italy. His main research interests include van der Waals 2D materials, molecular electronics, electronic and optical properties, semiconductor physics, and quantum transport.

The following is a short Q&A with Dr. Riccardo Frisenda, who shared his vision for the journal with us as well as his views on the research area and Open Access publishing:

This relatively new journal has already shown enormous potential. Thanks to the open access policy, the fast and rigorous peer review process, and the very skillful editorial team, it has already attracted many renowned researchers and scientists working in the field of low-dimensional materials and devices. Moreover, the main topic of the journal, manufacturing on the nanoscale, is a very appealing one since it has both scientific and technological impact and encompasses applications that vary from disruptive novel laboratory-scale discoveries to large-scale industrial processes and production.

2. What is your vision for the journal?

Nanomanufacturing is focused on the fabrication of miniaturized devices, platforms, and materials, and their eventual scalability and industrial production. The articles published until now have already shown a large variety of materials covered, varying from one-dimensional carbon nanotubes to two-dimensional van der Waals materials, and also including different topics from metasurface optics to drug delivery to optoelectronics. The journal will benefit in the future from this multidisciplinary approach, and the good balance between original articles and reviews will continue to generate interest toward the journal in the scientific community.

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?

I see the future of the nanomanufacturing field as being particularly bright, with tremendous and disrupting discoveries awaiting us in the next years or decades. The progress achieved in the last 30 years in this field has already been astonishing. In fact, most of the electronic devices that shape our world (such as modern laptops and smartphones) would not be possible without the knowledge of manufacturing on the nanoscale.

In my opinion, two topics that will develop more and more in the years to come are the self-assembly of low-dimensional materials on the nanoscale to create robust novel devices on a large scale and the combination of nanofabrication methods with machine learning AI for more precise and rational control of the fabrication process.

4. What do you think of the development of Open Access in the publishing field?

I think that the open access policy is a very important and innovative strategy to allow a wide diffusion of scientific research. Before this practice, scientific knowledge was basically inaccessible to a vast range of people, from scientists working in developing countries to students or the general public. I believe that widespread access to scientific knowledge is an important requirement to build a better future and overcome many of the challenges that the human population faces nowadays. However, the open access policy should also be accompanied by a rigorous peer review process to guarantee high scientific standards of the discoveries reported. In this respect, Nanomanufacturing combines these factors egregiously, effectively allowing the simultaneous achievement of excellent qualitative and informative impact in the sectors of interest and reaching a broad audience without paywalls.

We wish Dr. Riccardo Frisenda every success in his new position, and we look forward to his contributions to the journal.

For more information about the journal, please click on the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/nanomanufacturing.

MDPI is pleased to announce that we now display the co-authors’ email addresses in addition to the corresponding author’s email address on the webpage of published papers, protected by Captcha. For more information about this change, please visit the journal’s instructions for authors page. 

We believe this change will facilitate academic discussions and advance our cause of open science and research. The corresponding authors are responsible for communicating with their co-authors and indicating in our system (https://susy.mdpi.com/) if co-authors would prefer for their email addresses not to be displayed.

On 9 February 2023, Clarivate, a global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics, added the Preprint Citation Index to the Web of Science platform, streamlining the research process by allowing researchers to locate and link to preprints alongside other trusted content in the database.

The Preprint Citation Index will act as a bridge to connect cutting-edge preprints with peer-reviewed journal articles published within the Web of Science Core Collection. Alerts can be easily set to monitor new research across several repositories and authors will also be able to include preprints on their Web of Science Research Profile to more accurately display their various research outputs.

As of its launch, the Preprint Citation Index will provide nearly two million preprints from various repositories, including MDPI’s own Preprints.org.

MDPI's Preprints Platform – Preprints.org

To advance Open Science and the fast dissemination of research, MDPI offers researchers a free multidisciplinary preprint platform. Preprints.org accepts submissions from all research areas and offers authors high visibility, permanent archiving, article-level Metrics and immediately citable content by assigning a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to all preprints.

During submission to any MDPI journal, authors have the option to share their research as a preprint. After an initial screening, the manuscript is available online in 48 hours or less. Once online, preprints can be downloaded, shared, commented on, and cited, providing authors maximum visibility.

We invite you to join the ranks of the over 100k researchers using Preprints.org and share your research.

For more information, please visit Preprints.org.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative—the MDPI Special Issue Mentor Program.

This program will enable early career researchers (who must hold a Ph.D. in a related field) to experience editing a Special Issue in MDPI journals, under the mentorship of our experienced Editorial Board Members or other experienced scientists. The mentor program will provide an excellent opportunity for early career scientists to gain editorial experience, and to cultivate their ability to edit scientific research.

The mentee’s responsibilities include:

• Proposing a Special Issue title and assisting the mentor in preparing a summary (around 200–400 words) and 3–10 keywords describing the background, importance, and goal of the Issue;
• Writing a brief promotion plan for the Special Issue;
• Preparing a list of scholars who may be interested in the Issue and personally e-mailing invitations on behalf of Guest Editors;
• Writing an editorial for the online Special Issue together with the mentor.

The mentor’s responsibilities include:

• Conducting a final check before the Special Issue is published online;
• Performing editorial control of the Special Issue and quality control of the publications, both of which must be carried out in a timely manner;
• Providing suggestions to younger scholars if they have any doubts or concerns regarding submissions;
• Organizing video calls with young scholars and the Editorial Office regularly to discuss problems and improvement suggestions for the Special Issue;
• Making and submitting decisions regarding submissions with the assistance of mentees.

Certificates and awards:
After the Special Issue closes, the Editorial Office will provide official certificates for all the mentors and early career researchers.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your Special Issue proposal to the Editorial Office of a journal you choose, and we will discuss the process (i.e., mentor collaboration, Special Issue topic feasibility analysis, etc.) in further detail. The full list of MDPI journals is as follows: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals.

In addition to the new Special Issue Mentor Program, we will continue to welcome all Special Issue proposals focusing on hot research topics.

MDPI has just become the first open access (OA) publisher to reach the milestone of one million articles published. That is one million articles freely available to all, to circulate and build upon! We are proud to share this special moment with the global scientific community.

This landmark has been reached thanks to the immeasurable support of more than 600,000 expert reviewers, 66,000 editorial board members and 6700 hard-working colleagues across MDPI’s global offices.

Within more than 25 years of publishing, our journals received 2.1 million manuscripts and generated 4.6 million peer review reports to get to one million papers published.

Reaching the milestone of one million articles published reinforces our mission to remove any existing barriers and to make scientific research accessible to all. Since its inception, MDPI’s goal has been to create reliable processes to make science open. This is a path towards facilitating the dissemination of novel insights in scientific communities.

Regular feedback from authors and reviewers shows that our service is greatly appreciated and needed. At the same time, the feedback helps us identify areas for further improvement.

As it stands, a significant share of published research findings remain closed access. More than half of the content published with the most well-known legacy publishers stays behind a paywall, and that is not including articles published in hybrid OA journals, or made available months or years after publication.

A new policy announced by the US administration in August 2022 requires that, as of January 2026, all US federally funded research be made freely and immediately available after publication. While the new policy does not mandate articles be published under an open access license, it is aligned with the open access movement in removing all barriers to research. Similarly, some of the most advanced research institutions in the world intend to have all funded research articles published in open access by 2025.

MDPI is proud to be the leading agent of the transition to open access.

"Thanks a Million" to all the contributors!

We are pleased to announce that the website of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation has been revamped! For the past couple of months, our UX UI team and front-end developers have been working hard to launch the website in time for the opening of the Sustainability Awards nominations.

The website is not the only thing that has had a remodeling. Indeed, the format of the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award (ESLA) has been updated. ESLA is now a competition open to individual researchers or start-ups founded by researchers under the age of 35. Nominee applications will go through 2 rounds of selection until the final 3 are decided. The finalists will then be invited to give pitch presentations during the Award Ceremony to win either first place (10,000 USD) or runner-up (2 x 5000 USD).

The World Sustainability Award, on the other hand, remains the same: a total prize money of 100,000 USD is up for grabs by senior individual researchers or groups of researchers from the international research community.

Nominations for both the World Sustainability Award and the Emerging Sustainability Leader award are now open! Check out our new website for more information on how to nominate.

Scientists at Stanford have recently released a list that represents the top 2% of the most-cited scientists in various disciplines. The report was prepared by a team of experts led by Prof. John Ioannidis, the eminent Professor at Stanford University. The following 8 Nanomanufacturing Editorial Board Members were ranked in the top 2%:

Congratulations to all selected Editorial Board Members! Thank you for your great support of Nanomanufacturing! Nanomanufacturing will continue to work hard to improve its academic quality and academic influence!

About Nanomanufacturing

Nanomanufacturing (ISSN: 2673-687X) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes reviews, original research papers, communications, letters, and short notes that are relevant to any field of study involving the fabrication of miniaturized devices or objects, their scalability, and their eventual industrial production. This journal focuses on all aspects of lithographic methods aimed at the submicron scale to nanoscale; fabrication and integration of nanostructures, nanomaterials, and surfaces into functional devices; the exploitation and control of self-organization phenomena for patterning; and the further application of the created structures and devices in physical, biomedical, chemistry, environmental science, and life science experiments.

Journal contact
Nanomanufacturing Editorial Office
MDPI, St. Alban-Anlage 66, 4052 Basel, Switzerland
nanomanufacturing@mdpi.com
Tel.: +41 61 683 77 34 (MDPI HQ Basel, Switzerland / 9:00 - 17:00 CET)

Peer Review Week began 19 September 2022 under the theme of “Research Integrity: Creating and Supporting Trust in Research”. Through various blog articles, podcast, and webinar, we discussed this crucial subject throughout the week, celebrating the essential role peer review plays in maintaining research quality.

To begin, we held a Webinar on the topic. Professor Peter W. Choate and Dr. Emmanuel Obeng-Gyasi joined Dr. Ioana Craciun, one of MDPI’s scientific officers, for an in-depth discussion.

We invite you to view the event recording:

During the week, the MDPI Blog in a series articles highlighted how good Peer Review safeguards research integrity. The following topics were covered:

• Peer Review Week 2022
• Research Integrity
• What We’ve Learned About Peer Review Reports
• 4 Steps to the Perfect Peer Review Report
• How to Write the Perfect Peer Review Report: An Interview
• Inviting Great Peer Reviewers

In a new edition of Insight Faster, an MDPI podcast, we were delighted to talk to the co-chairs of the Peer Review Week committee, Jayashree Rajagopalan (Senior Manager of Global Community Engagement for CACTUS) and Danielle Padula (Head of Marketing and Community Development at Scholastica) to get their take on this year’s event and its related topics.

You can find the Podcast here.

We hope you enjoy the contents!

MDPI’s Young Investigator Awards recognize promising junior researchers, acknowledge their contributions, and enhance communication among scientists. We are proud to present the winners for the year 2021 in the “Chemistry & Materials Sciences” category. The winners were selected by the journals’ editors.

We warmly congratulate the awarded Young Investigators for their outstanding contributions.

MDPI will continue to provide support and recognition to the academic community.

Coatings:

• Marta Mohedano, Complutense University of Madrid-UCM, Spain

Materials:

• Edoardo Baldini, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Magnetochemistry:

• Mauro Perfetti, University of Florence, Italy

Membranes:

• Xu Hou, Xiamen University, China

Molecules:

• Biplab Maji, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, India

Nanomaterials:

• Andres Castellanos-Gomez, Instituto de Ciencia de los Materiales de Madrid, Spain
• Takuya Isono, Hokkaido University, Japan
• Panbo Liu, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China