Announcements

In June of this year, MDPI will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its foundation. To mark this significant milestone, we have created a 25th Anniversary page on our website that evokes the development of our company over the past quarter-century.

MDPI has been a pioneer of Open Access publishing ever since the concept was first created.

In a wide-ranging interview, our CEO Delia Mihaila reflects on the company’s 25th anniversary and its contribution to the world of scientific publishing.

Delia considers how MDPI has evolved since starting life in 1996 as a visionary ‘project’ run out of an apartment in Basel, Switzerland, by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin. A chemist who was passionate about the long-term preservation of rare chemical sample, Dr. Lin was determined to help scholars publish their findings as quickly as possible and make their research results available to as wide a readership as possible worldwide. That determination remains unchanged 25 years later.

Today, MDPI is an international organization with over 4,000 employees based on three continents and in ten countries, and ranks among the world's top four academic publishers.

MDPI's mission is to accelerate access to new scientific research, delivering insight faster for researchers worldwide. Read more here about the company's remarkable success story and what the Open Access publishing model can offer the global scientific community.

The 3rd National Conference on Energy and Environmental Science and Technology will be held at Southwest University on April 23–26, 2021. The conference is hosted by the China Energy Society, Energy and Environment Committee of China Energy Society and Beijing Energy and Environment Society, undertaken by Southwest University, co-organized by Shenyang Normal University and Beijing Institute of Petrochemical Technology.

The theme of the conference is "Energy and Environmental Technology in the New Era". The conference will cover cutting-edge technology development and basic research in the fields of materials and catalysts for energy conversion and utilization, emission and control of environmental pollutants, biomass energy and chemicals. This special conference aims to encourage original innovation, enhance cutting-edge exchanges, and promote the integration of disciplines as well as technological progress.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Processes
• Applied Sciences
• Materials
• Sustainability

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have.

For more information about the conference, please visit: http://iee.swu.edu.cn.

To cover more research areas and attract more high-quality papers on processes in engineering fields, we are pleased to announce that the Aims and Scope of Processes have been modified. For more detailed information, please click https://www.mdpi.com/journal/processes/about.

Aims

Processes (ISSN 2227-9717) provides an advanced forum for process/system-related research in chemistry, biology, material, energy, environment, food, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and allied engineering fields. The journal publishes regular research papers, communications, letters, short notes and reviews. Our aim is to encourage researchers to publishexperimental, theoretical and computational results in as much detail as possible. There is no restriction on paper length or number of figures and tables.

Scope

• Chemical Systems:
  experimental, theoretical and computational research on process development and engineering; chemical and biochemical reaction processes; mass transfer, separation and purification processes; mixing, fluid processing and heat transfer systems
• Biological Systems:
  biotechnology; cell and molecular biology; life sciences
• Materials Processes:
  materials processing and degradation; processes in biomaterials, energy materials, porous materials, nanomaterials, catalytic materials, and corrosion
• Green Processes:
  environmental processes; biomass processes; new disruptive processes for high efficiency; CCUS processes; distributed production processes
• Pharmaceutical Processes:
  nanomedicine and nanotechnology; pharmaceutical technology, manufacturing and devices; drug delivery and controlled release; pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics; gene and cell therapy; drug targeting and design; biologics and biosimilars
• Food Processes:
  food processing; food production; food preservation; emerging food technologies; food quality; food waste
• Energy Systems:
  energy system planning; energy system transition; changes in energy demand; energy and electricity markets
• Process Control and Supervision:
  simulation and modeling methods; process data-based approaches; model identification; process control; process supervision; process optimization; process intensification
• Manufacturing Processes:
  lithographic methods; fabrication and integration for functional devices; exploitation and control of self-organization phenomena for patterning; further application of the created structures and devices
• Automation Control Systems:
  process automation and monitoring; artificial neural networks; fault detection and diagnosis; intelligent control systems; learning systems; micro- and nano-systems; system condition monitoring; optimization algorithms; control theory; networked systems
• Advanced Digital and Other Processes:
  industry 4.0; digitalization; internet of things (IoT); additive technologies (3D printing); sustainability; blockchain; other processes

In order to specifically develop different research areas and attract more high-quality papers, we are pleased to announce the addition of the following two new sections in Processes to cover all the disciplines of process/systems.

• Manufacturing Processes
• Automation Control Systems

We are now recruiting Editorial Board Members and Topic Editorial Board Member for these sections. If you are an active researcher in one of the aforementioned fields or know of potential candidates to recommend, please do not hesitate to get in touch (processes@mdpi.com).

As an Editorial Board Member, you will be responsible for supervising the operation of the journal. These responsibilities include the following:

• Making decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted or not based on the reports we collect;
• Suggesting special topics or editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research;
• Promoting the journal and increasing its visibility at related academic conferences.

Processes (ISSN 2227-9717) provides an advanced forum for process/system-related research in chemistry, biology, material, energy, environment, food, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and allied engineering fields.

At MDPI, we strive to make your online publication process seamless and efficient. To achieve this, our team is continuously developing tools and features to make the user experience useful and convenient.

As the number of academic papers continues to grow, so does the need to analyze and work with them on a large scale. This prompted us to design a new feature aimed at helping researchers find journals that are relevant to their publication by matching their abstract topic. In this regard, we designed a similarity model that automatically identifies the most suitable academic journals for your paper.

We are pleased to introduce Journal Selector, a new feature that measures similarity in academic contexts. By simply entering the title and/or abstract into our Journal Selector, the author will see a list of the most related scientific journals published by MDPI. This method helps authors select the correct journals for their papers, highlighting the time of publication and citability.

The methodology is known as representation learning, where words are represented as vectors in hyperspace. Representation helps us differentiate between different concepts within articles, and in turn, helps us identify similarities between them.

We used an advanced machine learning model to better capture the semantic meanings of words. This helps the algorithm make better predictions by leveraging scientific text representation. In turn, this ensures high precision, helping authors decide which journal they should submit their paper to.

The goal is to support authors to publish their work in the most suitable journal for their research, as fast as possible, accelerating their career progress.

Contact: Andrea Perlato, Head of Data Analytics, MDPI (email)

MDPI is proud to adopt the principles of the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) to support building equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications.

The C4DISC represents organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications and is focused on addressing issues of diversity and inclusion within the publishing industry.

MDPI’s Managing Editors encourage the Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, geographic location, sexual orientation, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and editors of MDPI journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.

Representatives from C4DISC meet monthly, and have started to implement initiatives to shed light and improve on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. Some of the initiatives include developing a joint statement of principles; conducting market research; providing training resources, best practices, toolkits, and documentation for our collective memberships; and establishing outreach programs, curricula, events, and publications.

The Coalition is committed to:

• eliminating barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination;
• creating and maintaining an environment that respects diverse traditions, heritages, and experiences;
• promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making;
• raising awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce;
• supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations.

At MDPI we have slightly revised the layout for articles to be published in the 2021 Volume, starting at the end of December 2020. As of today, the article templates available for download on ‘Instructions for Authors’ pages have been updated.

The most noticeable change can be found on the first page of the article, where a left-hand column has been created to include the following front matter elements: (i) the recommended citation style for the article, (ii) the publishing history, (iii) as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license used (iv) a standard note regarding affiliations. At the same time, the extra spacing on the left means the authors’ affiliations are now more clearly set apart than before. Other front matter key elements such as journal logo, article type, article title, authors, abstract and keywords remain unchanged.

The blank column on the left runs through all pages in an article; as a result, the main text is slightly more condensed, which improve reader friendliness for smaller screens. Small figures/tables are aligned on the left with standard indenture, while large figures/tables are centered and covering the full width of the page. The revised layout was applied in the article pictured below, to serve as an example:

1) Information is displayed in the left information bar.

2) In the main text, there is a blank column on the left.

3) Small tables/figures are aligned on the left, large tables/figures are centered.

We are pleased to acknowledge that many academic editors who have made an impact on MDPI journals as editorial board members, editors-in-chief, or section editors, are recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Highly Cited Researchers highlights the top 1% of researchers, by citations, in one or more of the 22 fields used in Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We offer our congratulations to 279 academic editors of MDPI journals who were recognized as the most influential scholars in their fields in 2020.

The full list of 2020 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed on https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2020/

--- Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) is a Clarivate product.

MDPI will be attending the 2020 Chinese Annual Conference of Process Systems Engineering (PSE2020), Chongqing, China, 13–15 November, 2020.

PSE2020 is hosted by the Committee of Process Systems Engineering, Chinese Society for Systems Engineering. The aim is to strengthen the intersection and integration of PSE and related disciplines to promote the transformation of the latest scientific and technological achievements in process systems engineering, to support scientific and technological progress and the national economic and social development of the process industry, and to provide a platform for domestic and foreign experts, scholars, and engineers in the field of process systems engineering to exchange, discuss, and report the latest research results.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Processes (leading journal);

Energies;

Electronics;

Mathematics;

Safety;

Sustainability;

Logistics;

Chemengineering;

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit http://hgxy.cqu.edu.cn/info/1158/4317.htm.

The journal Processes is launching a new position—Topic Editor. The main responsibilities of Topic Editors are as follows:

1. Promoting the journal at conferences (adding 1–2 slides into your presentation, distributing flyers, recommending the journal to your colleagues, etc.);
2. Promoting the journal on scholarly platforms (ResearchGate, Academia.edu), social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), or your personal website;
3. Providing support for themed Special Issues that fall into your expertise (when the Guest Editors are not available), including pre-checking new submissions, making decisions, giving advice on scientific cases, etc.

Benefits

Topic Editors are encouraged to apply for travel grants for themselves or their research group after their 2-year tenure has been served. Topic Editors will be preferred as Editorial Board Members whenever we have vacancies.

If you are interested in this role or if you have any suggestions, please feel free to contact us (processes@mdpi.com).