Announcements

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our national Open Access agreement with the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Through this national agreement, the Austrian institutions listed below as well as FWF will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by eligible corresponding or funded authors in MDPI journals as long as central funds are available.

All participating institutions have gained access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Funder and Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency. At the same time eligible authors are benefited from an APC discount which comes at no cost for the institutions.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with the participating institutions are prompted to choose the corresponding 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 address. To claim their discount, FWF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript. The institutions will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Eligible authors that have their APC covered by their institution or funder are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "Open Access Funding by the [name of the institution/funder]".

The full text of the agreement is openly available online at: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2536007

For any questions about the agreement, please contact the KEMÖ Consortium at emedien@obvsg.at, FWF at Katharina.Rieck@fwf.ac.at, or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

The Austrian institutions participating in this agreement are:

• Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
• University for Continuing Education Krems
• University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna
• University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien
• Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
• Institute of Science and Technology Austria
• MCI Management Center Innsbruck
• University of Graz
• University of Linz
• University of Salzburg
• Graz University of Technology
• TU Wien
• University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna
• University of Vienna

This is our first collective agreement with a national library consortium, while the individual institutions around the world participating in our IOAP are now more than 500 - see details here: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap. We would be mostly interested in discussing about possible collaborations with other consortia, funders, and institutions in our mutual efforts to accelerate Open Access.

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/

We are pleased to inform the two journals Plants (ISSN 2223-7747) and Foods (ISSN 2304-8158) have been accepted for inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) in the Web of Science Core Collection, as well as Current Contents - Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences. Meanwhile, Plants continues to be listed in BIOSIS Previews.

Both journals were established in 2012 and have since made an impact in the scientific community. For example, research published in Plants has been cited more than 880 times in Scopus in 2017 and 2018 to date. Out of four hundred research articles published in Foods since inception, 33 have been cited at least ten times, according to Crossref data.

Foods and Plants are due to receive first Journal Impact Factors based on Web of Science data in next year's release of the Journal Citation Reports in mid-2019.

The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Web of Science^TM, BIOSIS Previews and Journal Citation Reports are Clarivate Analytics products.

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.

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.

Location: Baltimore, MD, USA
Date: 4–7 November 2018

We will be attending the 2018 ASA and CSSA Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD, USA, to be held 4–7 November 2018. The American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Canadian Society of Agronomy will host approximately 2,500 scientists, professionals, educators, and students at the 2018 International Annual Meeting, "Enhancing Productivity in a Changing Climate". It’s the premiere opportunity for professionals working in agronomic, crop, soil, and related sciences to hear about the latest research, meet and learn from their peers, expand their knowledge base, and take advantage of an abundance of networking opportunities to enhance their career. This year’s Annual Meeting will feature more than 2,000 technical presentations, along with a host of networking events and award ceremonies. The world-class exhibition displays the latest scientific equipment, supplies, services, and reference materials available. Representatives of the following MDPI open access journals will attend:

• Agronomy
• Insects
• Agriculture
• Plants
• Horticulturae
• Sustainability
• Land

For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.acsmeetings.org/about

In May 2018, the Australian Society of Plant Scientists (ASPS) chose IJMS and Plants as its preferred journals and became an affiliated society member of the journals.

As part of this collaboration, all affiliated ASPS members enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) for any article published in IJMS and Plants. The Australian Society of Plant Scientists (ASPS) is an incorporated society that promotes Plant Science in Australia, and provides professional support within the community of teachers and researchers in plant sciences. J.G. Wood was the original Foundation President of the Society and in collaboration with R.N. Robertson, brought the concept of the Society to fruition.

We are pleased to report Plants received a CiteScore of 3.13 for 2017. The metric reflects citation activity in 2017 in Scopus for papers published in the period 2014‒2016.

Plants ranks 48th out of 389 in the 'Plant Science' category.

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.