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.

MDPI will be attending the CLEO Laser Science to Photonic Applictions, San Jose, California, USA, May 12-14, 2020

Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics to generate quality face-time with world renowned industry leaders and help achieve your annual sales and marketing goals. Special industry offerings make this event a magnet for executives and scientific equipment users throughout the buying channel. Exhibitors will have extensive, targeted opportunities for exposure and in-depth interaction with key prospects and customers. These high-level buyers are looking to you—the leading product experts, manufacturers and service providers—for the most innovative, cost-effective solutions to support their missions.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Applied Sciences (leading journal)
• Photonics (co-leading)
• Electronics
• Fibers
• Materials

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #2607). 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.cleoconference.org/home/.

Photonics is calling for Special Issue proposals for the six new sections:

• Biophotonics and Biomedical Optics
• Optical Communication, Information Processing, and Data Storage
• Optoelectronics and Optical Materials
• Lasers, Light Sources and Sensors
• Optical Interaction Science
• Classical Optics

Any other proposals within the scope of the journal are welcome: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/photonics/about.

The following information will be required to submit: Special Issue Title, Introduction, Planned Paper list.

The duties and benefits of acting as a Guest Editors are as follows:

– To re-define the title and scope of this Special Issue

– To make decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted or not based on the reports we collect;

– To promote the Special Issue and increase its visibility at related academic conferences.

– Full/ Partial waivers on the publishing fees will be granted for your first submission in this Special Issue.

Guest Editorship: 2–3 Editors for a team. This could balance the workload for the editors and could also enable an internal discussion in case any controversial issue arises. Moreover, as the Guest Editors have different research networks, the cooperation would broaden the coverage of potential authors, thereby increasing the influence of the Special Issue. Once your proposal is approved, you have the priority to organize a team. The Publisher and EiC will review these co-editors to ensure they meet the journal’s editorial requirements. We encourage teams to include editors from multiple institutions and locations. This diversity reduces potential conflicts of interest and helps the issue to reach a wider audience.

If you are interested in editing a special issue, please contact us before 31 December 2020. To propose or request further information, please contact the Photonics Editorial Office (photonics@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Photonics publishes high impact fundamental research but also applications of optics and photonics. The journal particularly welcomes both theoretical (simulation) and experimental research and is covered by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE - Web of Science), Inspec (IET), as well as Scopus CiteScore 2.16. The first Impact Factor expected in June 2020 (JCR - Clarivate Analytics). To date, 51 articles have been cited 10 times or more (h-10 index). The website of Photonics can be accessed here.

Photonics is recruiting Editorial Board members for the following six new sections:

• Biophotonics and Biomedical Optics
• Optical Communication, Information Processing, and Data Storage
• Optoelectronics and Optical Materials
• Lasers, Light Sources and Sensors
• Optical Interaction Science
• Classical Optics

These sections will expand the Editorial Board and cover areas that are less represented by the current team. If you are interested in this position or know of potential candidates to recommend, please contact us by 31 December 2020.

Photonics publish high impact fundamental research but also applications of optics and photonics. The journal particularly welcomes both theoretical (simulation) and experimental research, covered by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE - Web of Science), Inspec (IET), as well as Scopus. First Impact Factor expected in June 2020 (JCR - Clarivate Analytics). The website of Photonics can be accessed here.

As an Editorial Board member, you have the following responsibilities:

– To make decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted or not based on the reports we collect;

– To edit a Special Issue on a topic related to your research interests when it is convenient for you;

– To promote Photonics and increase its visibility at related academic conferences.

To apply or request further information, please contact the Photonics Editorial Office (photonics@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

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 will attend PSCO-2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 30 September to 2 October 2019.

As the 5th International Conference on Perovskite Solar Cells and Optoelectronics, this event will bring a broad spectrum of the community together to discuss and share knowledge on the latest advances in perovskite materials, devices, and photophysical and optoelectronic properties and phenomena.

It will also host a special session dedicated to speakers working in industry. Additionally, two sessions will be sponsored by two European Projects on perovskites, Espresso and PerTPV.

Representatives from MDPI will be present to exhibit our open access journals

Energies, Batteries, Photonics, and Nanomaterials.

If you plan to attend this event, please visit us at the SwissTech Convention Center. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have regarding open access publishing or our journals. For more information about this conference, please visit https://www.psco-conference.org/index.php

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.

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.