Announcements

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

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.

In June and July 2019, four societies chose to establish a cooperation with MDPI journals.

As part of this collaboration, the members of these affiliated societies will enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) when submitting articles to the corresponding journals. The collaboration goes beyond the discount benefit offered to members and includes other services as well as cross-promotions.

Further information about these societies:

Spanish Society of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology (SEFIG) is a national organization that includes pharmacists and other graduates devoted to pharmaceutical R&D and pharmaceutical education related to the pharmaceutical industry, university education, and research centers or health institutions.

Spanish Society for Cellular Biology (SEBC) was founded in 1984 and it is currently formed by over 350 members. It was initially established as a scientific association to coordinate research and formative activities in the field of Cell Biology.

Canadian Urban Transit Research & Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC) is an innovation consortium that seeks to make Canada a global leader in low carbon smart mobility technologies across heavy-duty and light-duty platforms, including advanced transit, transportation, and integrated mobility applications. It supports the commercialization of technologies through industry-led collaborative research, development, demonstration/delivery, and integration (RDD&I) projects that bring innovative design to Canada’s low-carbon smart mobility eco-system.

Clim4Vitis (Climate Change Impact Mitigation for European Viticulture) is a three-year Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Union Research and Innovation programme. Coordinated by UTAD (Portugal), with the support of PIK (Germany), UNIFI (Italy), LIST (Luxembourg) and SPI (Portugal), the project aims to encourage S&T capacity and performance in grapevine modelling with a vision to implement methods and tools for assessing climate change impacts on European viticulture. First edition of the project Newsletter can be found here.

Pharmaceutics, MDPI’s open-access journal on the science and technology of pharmaceutics and biopharmaceutics, has published more than 1000 articles and reviews since its inception in 2009. Pharmaceutics is now indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) (Impact Factor 4.773, ranks 26/267 (Q1) in the category “Pharmacology & Pharmacy” in the Journal Citation Reports), PubMed, and Scopus. It is also a member of DOAJ.

Our sincerest thanks go to the Editor-in-Chief of Pharmaceutics, Prof. Dr. Yvonne Perrie, and all the Editorial Board members, as well as to Guest Editors of Special Issues. Only with their strong support can we achieve rapid growth in publications and maintain our high level of quality.

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.

In June 2019, the Spanish Society of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology (SEFIG) became affiliated to Pharmaceutics. As part of this collaboration, all members of SEFIG enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) when submitting articles to Pharmaceutis.

The Spanish Society of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology (SEFIG) is a national organization that includes pharmacists and other graduates devoted to pharmaceutical R&D and pharmaceutical education related to the pharmaceutical industry, university education, and research centers or health institutions.

The aims of the society are to contribute to professional development and to promote and disseminate research and knowledge in the fields of pharmaceutics and pharmaceutical technology.

SEFIG is a professional organization whose functions are highly relevant to the scope of Pharmaceutics. We look forward to collaborating with SEFIG and publishing state-of-the-art research from its members in this field.

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

We are pleased to inform that Pharmaceutics received an updated Journal Impact Factor of 4.773 in the recent release of the Journal Citation Reports®. Pharmaceutics now ranks 26/267 (Q1) in the category 'Pharmacology & Pharmacy’.

Source: data according to Journal Citation Reports®, 2018 release, a Clarivate Analytics product.

In May 2019, the Pharmaceutical Solid State Research Cluster (PSSRC) became affiliated to Pharmaceutics. As part of this collaboration, all members of PSSRC enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) when submitting articles to Pharmaceutics.

The PSSRC aims to initiate and foster collaborative research between its members in all areas of the pharmaceutical solid state field by forming a network with equipment and expertise for processing of pharmaceuticals with all critical unit operations and related solid state analysis, providing a discussion forum to exchange ideas and facilitate novel innovations, providing a network to exchange members of the cluster through student and staff research visits and facilitating collaborations of its members in joint academic research projects and projects with the industry.

PSSRC is a professional organization whose functions are highly relevant to the scope of Pharmaceutics. We look forward to collaborating with PSSRC and publishing state-of-the-art research from its members in this field.