Announcements

We are pleased to announce the new platform Encyclopedia, which is an online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as providing benchmark information for researchers and the general public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge on specific topics.

We encourage authors of review articles to quote and adapt the content of their published papers to create Encyclopedia entries. You can create completely new entries on topics in which you have knowledge and expertise. There is no limit on the topics or research fields. All of science and the humanities are included. Each entry will be published directly after submission.

We also have prepared a DOI application function in Encyclopedia. Once a DOI application is approved, the entry website will announce the DOI number and a pdf version with DOI information will be automatically created.

We look forward to your contributions and hope you will make use of this service. Find more about the service at: https://encyclopedia.pub/

Prof. Nelson Tansu, Editor-in-Chief of Photonics, is regarded as a principle contributor to groundbreaking research in the field of semiconductor optoelectronics materials and devices. He has recently been added to the Clarivate Analytics list of "Highly Cited Researchers". This prestigious assignment is one that each year includes only researchers ranking in the top one percent of their field. Tansu, the Daniel E. ’39 and Patricia M. Smith Endowed Chair Professor and director of Lehigh’s Center for Photonics and Nanoelectronics (CPN), has been added to the “Cross-Field/Multidisciplinary” section of the list for supporting, influencing, inspiring and challenging other researchers around the globe.

Prof. Dr. Yuri Kivshar, an Editorial board member of Photonics and based at the Nonlinear Physics Center of the Research School of Physics and Engineering at Australian National University, is celebrating a second year of recognition as a “Cross-Field/Multidisciplinary” researcher on the “Highly Cited Researchers” list and, in 2017, Australia’s only Physicist to receive this honor.

MDPI congratulates Prof. Tansu and Prof. Dr. Yuri Kivshar on their tremendous achievement.

Highly Cited Researchers is a Clarivate Analytics product.

We are delighted to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now a participant of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). Authors funded by the BMGF can enjoy discounts on the APC, while the funder covers the costs of eligible articles centrally. BMGF also has access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency.

We hope that funded authors find the programme beneficial and we are happy to offer our IOAP to other funders that need a streamlined workflow of compliance checking and APC coverage. 

To claim their discount, BMGF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript.

For any questions about the BMGF agreement, please contact the funder at support@chronos-oa.com or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

Prof. Angela Vasanelli, Chair of IQCLSW 2018 and Special Issue Editor of IQCLSW 2018 Special Issue in Photonics (left), Dr. Azzura Bigioli, and Prof. Manijeh Razeghi, Photonics Editorial Board member (right).

Photonics is pleased to announce that the Photonics Poster Prize at the IQCLSW 2018 conference was awarded to Azzura Bigioli from University Paris VII for her work “Antenna-Coupled Arrays and Single Patch Detector at 9 µm”, highlighting a new class of single-pixel sub-wavelength detectors with high responsivity ideal for coherent detection in the mid-infrared range. The award consisted of a certificate and a 500 CHF cash prize.

Further, all the participants of IQCLSW 2018 will be encouraged to submit their contributions to the IQCLSW 2018 Special Issue of Photonics.

Dr. Paola Prete (left) and Prof. Enzo Di Fabrizio (KAUST, Saudi Arabia), NANOP 2018 Chairman (right)

Photonics is pleased to announce the Best Oral Presentation prize at the NANOP 2018 conference was awarded to Dr. Paola Prete of IMM-CNR, Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems, Italy, for her presentation on “Nano-Scale Luminescence Imaging and Properties of Radially-Heterostructured III-V Nanowires"

The award consisted of a certificate and a €500 cash prize. Further, if the winner wishes to publish the full-length paper in the open access journal Photonics, after the standard journal reviewing process, the article processing charges will be fully waived.

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 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.

MDPI will be attending the 2018 Quantum Technology International Conference (QTech 2018), to be held in Paris, France, 5–7 September 2018.

The objective of the QTech conference is to present the latest developments of quantum technologies in the domains of quantum communication, computation, simulation, sensors and metrology, and their implementation using various platforms from atoms and ions to solid states, superconducting circuits and optics.

The following eight MDPI journals will be represented:

Entropy
Technologies
Atoms
Photonics
Computation
Condensed Matter
Cryptography
Quantum Reports

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (you can find us easily in the exhibition area). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have concerning open access publishing and our journals. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://premc.org/conferences/qtech-quantum-technology/.

We are pleased to report Photonics received a CiteScore of 1.96 for 2017. The metric reflects citation activity in 2017 in Scopus for papers published in the period 2014‒2016.

For the full details in the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile. To check the full list of MDPI journals receiving CiteScores, please see here.