Announcements

Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.

We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Ajay Goel from the Baylor University Medical Center (Dallas, TX, USA) has joined the Editorial Board of our open access journal, Non-Coding RNA (ISSN 2311-553X). Prof. Goel is an internationally recognized expert on the epigenetic basis of gastrointestinal cancers, and we firmly believe that his knowledge will be a valuable addition to our esteemed group of board members.

Prof. Goel graduated and completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics at Panjab University (Chandigarh, India). After this, Prof. Goel moved to the USA to continue his career as a postdoctoral researcher, first at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA, USA) and a few years later at the University of California San Diego (La Jolla, CA, USA). Currently, Prof. Goel is leading several research projects at the Baylor University Medical Center to unravel the genetics and epigenetic basis of gastrointestinal cancers.

Prof. Goel has a long-standing interest in understanding the pathogenesis of colorectal cancer. One of the main objectives of his research is cancer prevention through the development of biomarkers for human cancers. Prof. Goel also has a great interest in the role of non-coding RNAs in cancer pathogenesis, as well as the potential application of microRNAs as molecular biomarkers. To date, his research concerning non-coding RNA has focused on developing non-invasive biomarkers for the early detection of gastrointestinal cancers, as well as markers useful as survival indicators and predictive biomarkers of response to various treatments in gastrointestinal cancers.

Prof. Goel believes that it is simply a matter of time before the growing and exciting role of non-coding RNAs enters an even more important stage of development—both in fundamental biological research, and the translation of these findings into clinical research.

We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".

For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at openaccess@qnl.qa.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Ondrej Slaby from the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) and Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute (Brno, Czech Republic) has joined the Editorial Board of the journal Non-Coding RNA (ISSN 2311-553X). Dr. Slaby is an internationally recognized leader in non-coding RNA research and oncology, and we firmly believe that his expertise will be a worthwhile addition to our esteemed group of experts.

Prof. Dr. Ondrej Slaby graduated and completed his Ph.D. at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic) in medical biochemistry.

Currently, Prof. Dr. Slaby is leading his research group at the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC). His research focuses on the study of the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of ncRNAs (e.g., microRNAs and lncRNAs) in oncology. His investigations comprise several cancers, such as colorectal cancer, renal cell carcinoma, and glioblastoma. To date, Prof. Dr. Slaby has discovered several new oncogenic and tumor-suppressive non-coding RNAs in solid cancer (e.g., miR-215 or long non-coding RNA ZFAS1). A combined microRNA/piRNA signature identified by his group is now under development as a new certified diagnostic in colorectal cancer.

Prof. Dr. Slaby believes in a bright future and strong translational potential of non-coding RNAs for the diagnosis and therapy of cancer.

Dr. Anthony Mustoe from the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC, USA) was awarded the Non Coding RNA Best Poster Award, offered at the FASEB SRC meeting “Posttranscriptional Control of Gene Expression: Mechanisms of RNA Decay” (24–29 June 2018, Scottsdale, AZ, USA).

This FASEB SRC highlighted the current advances in the understanding of the pathways, mechanisms, and enzymatic activities controlling RNA turnover in eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells and by viruses. The journal Non-Coding RNA offered a Best Poster Award at this meeting, for which all attendees with a poster presentation on non-coding RNAs were eligible.

Dr. Anthony Mustoe is a postdoctoral follow in Dr. Kevin Weeks’ laboratory. His research focuses on the development of new computational and SHAPE-chemistry methods for determining RNA structure and dynamics on genome-wide scales. Dr. Mustoe showed his findings at this FASEB meeting in a poster presentation entitled “Pervasive Regulatory Functions of Bacterial mRNA Structure Revealed by High Resolution SHAPE Probing”.

Image: Dr. Aaron Goldstrohm (right, conference organizer) delivering the Best Poster Award certificate to Dr. Anthony Mustoe (left, award winner)

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Shuxing Zhang from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, TX, USA) has joined the Editorial Board of the journal Non-Coding RNA (ISSN 2311-553X). Dr. Zhang is an internationally recognized leader in computational modeling and drug discovery, and we firmly believe that his expertise will be a worthwhile addition to our esteemed group of experts.

Dr. Shuxing Zhang graduated from Peking University (Beijing, China) and completed his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC, USA) in the School of Pharmacy.

Currently, Dr. Zhang is leading the Intelligent Molecular Discovery Laboratory at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. His research focuses on the development of novel computational strategies and frameworks for protein and RNA modeling, with a strong interest in targeted and personalized cancer therapy. Using his unique platform, Dr. Zhang has developed numerous therapeutic agents currently at the different stages of preclinical, Phase I, and Phase II clinical trials. His investigations involve a variety of targets, such as EGFR, Skp2, Akt, microRNAs, and lncRNAs. To date, Dr. Zhang has implemented various novel methods based on artificial intelligence, cheminformatics, molecular docking, and scoring functions (just to name a few) for drug discovery and development.

Dr. Zhang believes that RNA modeling, in particular accurate ncRNA structure prediction, is an area with significant challenges that needs a great deal of collective effort from the community. Such studies could have a tremendous impact on non-coding RNA biology and their implication in human health, and thus publications in this area should be encouraged to advance the field.

The 2017 CiteScore™ data is available now, based on citation data in the Scopus® database. The current CiteScore reflects citation activity in 2017 for articles published in 2014‒2016. Please note that the list below includes journals assigned a CiteScore in this year’s release. For a full list of journals indexed in Scopus, please see our journal list.

Thirteen of our journals received a CiteScore which is in the top 10% of the distribution in at least one of the categories (marked with * in the table below), while a further 32 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

Unlike CiteScores and the widely used Journal Impact Factors, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metrics are normalized in order to correct for differences in citation practices between scientific fields. Therefore, the SNIP allows direct comparison between journals specialized in different fields.

According to 2017 data, MDPI publishes six journals with an average citation impact, or SNIP, in excess of 1.500. These journals are Biomolecules, Cancers, Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM), Marine Drugs, Remote Sensing and Sensors (see the last column in the table below).

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

We are pleased to announce the results of the first MDPI Writing Prize. We received a large number of entries from across the globe on the theme of “The Global Benefits of Open Research”. It was a pleasure to read so many original, well-researched and well-presented ideas, and the final choice was not an easy one. We are pleased to announce that the winners are as follows:

1st prize (500 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Edmond Sanganyado, Shantou University, China

2nd prizes (250 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Kamala T. Rajahgopal, Asia e University, Malaysia
Yin Zhixuan, Qingdao University of Technology, China

3rd prizes (100 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Alexandra Ticea, Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania
Ankur Sarker, University of Virginia, USA
Daniel Attoye, United Arab Emirates University, UAE

Congratulations to all of them! The winning entries can be downloaded by clicking on the names above. A compilation of all entries will soon be available as an open access book.

The writing prize is sponsored by the MDPI English editing service.