Announcements

Once over 10 papers are received for this Special Issue, one of the published papers will be selected to receive an SI Best Paper Award by an Evaluation Committee.

Criteria:

From papers submitted to this Special Issue, the award nominees will be assessed for their originality, quality, contribution to the field, and presentation.

Award:

An SI Best Paper Award consisting of 300 CHF and a Certificate will be given to the authors of the winning best paper at the Special Issue–Microwave Photonics 2017.

Editor-in-Chief of Photonics, Nelson Tansu, recently hosted U.S. Congressman Charles W. Dent at the Lehigh University’s Center for Photonics and Nanoelectronics (CPN). Tansu is the Director of CPN and the Daniel E. ’39 and Patricia M. Smith Endowed Chair Professor, and he is also the Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Since 2005, said Tansu, 140 Lehigh students have received PhDs working in photonics-themed disciplines within the center. Many now hold positions of technical leadership with top academic institutions and industrial companies. Leveraging the vertically-integrated faculty and facilities within CPN, these faculty research projects have led to impactful activities in the areas of III-nitride semiconductors, 2D layered materials, terahertz sensors, optical coherence tomography, functional glass photonics and others. 

Congressman Dent said he was greatly impressed by the work being done at the CPN, and he highlighted that the CPN is “at the forefront of technologies that operate at scales often invisible to the human eye”.

Professor Nelson Tansu (left) and U.S. Congressman Charles Dent (right) discuss about the status and plans for the Center for Photonics and Nanoelectronics at Lehigh University. The meeting also includes CPN faculty members and other representatives of the photonics industry.

We are pleased to announce that the journals Photonics (ISSN 2304-6732) and Processes (ISSN 2227-9717) have recently been selected to be included in Scopus. Coverage starts from the current volume (2017); citations are expected to be available in Scopus towards the end of the year.

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and is published by Elsevier B.V. This means that the research you publish with Photonics and Processes will be more visible than ever.

Congratulations to the authors Javier Monroy and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez from Universidad de Malaga, Spain, Victor Hernandez-Bennets, Han Fan and Achim Lilienthal from Örebro University, Sweden for publishing the 100,000th peer-reviewed article.

The article is published in the Chemical Sensors section of Sensors.

GADEN: A 3D Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments

Evermore pressing environmental concerns have led global actors and decision-makers to search for stricter emission monitoring approaches. As part of novel monitoring systems, robots with gas and environmental sensors are a promising solution. However, validation of such robotic inspectors is expensive, time consuming, and plagued by repeatability issues. In this article, we present GADEN (the short form for Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments), which combines gas dispersion and robotics simulation in a common framework. Developed under the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS), GADEN enables validation of sensing strategies with gas dispersion being simulated using computational fluid dynamics and filament dispersion theory. GADEN allows simulating complex, realistic, 3D environments for reproducible testing of robotic gas sensing algorithms. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we show that GADEN is a versatile and user-friendly evaluation tool and emphasize its enormous potential for the mobile robot olfaction community.

Read the full article here: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/7/1479/htm

We will be attending the World of Photonic Congress 2017, which takes place June 25-29, 2017, representing the following open access journals:

Applied Sciences
Materials
Technologies
Photonics
Micromachines

Please come along to our stand, to have a chat about our journals with our delegates about our journals andor to learn more about our travel awards that offered to Postdocs and PhD students by the representeding journals offering to Postdocs and PhD students.

Conference address:
World of Photonic Congress 2017
International Congress Center, Munich, Germany

Conference date:
June 25–-29 2017

For more information on the conference, please visit:
http://www.cleoeurope.org/world-of-photonics-congress

The CiteScore, the new citation metric for journals covered in the Scopus® database, was released on 1 June 2017, reflecting the citation activity in 2016 for articles published during the three previous years. Please note that the list below does not contain all MDPI journals covered in Scopus. For the CiteScore to serve as a reliable metric at least three volumes of articles need to be indexed in Scopus; journals which have not met this criterion have been omitted here.

Ten MDPI journals received a CiteScore which is in the Top 10% of scores in at least one of the categories, while a further 21 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

We are pleased to announce that the Goethe University of Frankfurt, the Technical University of Hamburg (TU Hamburg-Harburg), as well as the Humboldt University of Berlin, in Germany, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

As an open access publisher, we are keen to support openness and transparency in the research process. Citation data is very important for assessing the value of individual papers and the contribution of researchers. As such, we support the recently launched Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). The initiative recognizes that citations should be freely available and machine-readable. By doing so, authors gain the maximum benefit from having their work cited.

MDPI now uploads citation data with metadata uploaded to Crossref when registering digital object identifiers (DOIs) for published papers. We are delighted to take this step to support a truly open research environment.

Getting high quality review reports is critical for any journal’s editorial process. At MDPI we have put in place several measures to motivate reviewers and reward them for their work. We are proud of the quality of reviewer reports we receive and grateful for the hours put in by active researchers from across the globe.

Reviewers of MDPI’s largest journals can get recognition via Publons, a website dedicated to rewarding peer reviewers. They have now taken this one step further and launched the Publons Reviewer Academy to help train reviewers to provide useful feedback. Through the academy, researchers can be trained and tutored in various aspects of how to provide structured feedback that will be of genuine help to editors and authors. We support this initiative and recommend it to potential MDPI reviewers, especially early career researchers. See the Publons announcement for further information.

More information on reviewing for MDPI, including how to volunteer as a reviewer, can be found here.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA and the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.