Announcements

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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.

Last week, the DeepGreen initiative in Germany started into an advanced test phase with the publishing partners S. Karger AG, SAGE Publishing, MDPI, Frontiers and De Gruyter, as well as 27 universities from all over Germany, from Hamburg University of Applied Sciences to University of Konstanz.

DeepGreen aims at lowering the barriers for open access publishing by automatically delivering metadata and full text publications from participating publishers to authorized repositories at German universities.

In preparation for a later live operation, the advanced test phase serves to gain experience with extensive data deliveries from publishers and also handling different repository software (including OPUS4, DSpace, EPrints, MyCoRe). DeepGreen thereby acts as a sophisticated platform, receiving articles published by authors affiliated with German universities and depositing these articles to respective university repositories, based on the affiliation metadata. For more information about DeepGreen: https://deepgreen.kobv.de

Karger AG has been a close cooperation partner of the DeepGreen consortium since 2016. S. Karger has more than 80 subscription-based and around 20 open access journals covering a wide spectrum in health science. DeepGreen will assign S. Karger articles to authorized institutions on the legal basis of German alliance and national licenses.

SAGE Publishing  was founded by Sara Miller McCune in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1,000 journals and over 600 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. SAGE Publishing has been a close cooperation partner of DeepGreen since 2016.

MDPI  is a scientific open access publisher and has been a partner of DeepGreen since 2017. MDPI comprises 205 peer-reviewed journals of various disciplines. All articles are published under a CC-BY license and are freely available without embargo period.

Frontiers  is a scientific open access publisher with 61 journals of over 600 academic disciplines. All articles are peer-reviewed and published freely available under CC-BY license.

De Gruyter  is an academic publisher with more than 700 subscription-based and open access journals of 29 disciplines. Articles provided by De Gruyter will be assigned to institutions with German alliance and national licenses.

There is promising communication with other publishers.

DeepGreen is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the consortium comprises six institutions: the Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg, Bavarian State Library, Bavarian Library Network, University Library of the Technische Universität Berlin, University Library of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Helmholtz Open Science Coordination Office at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

The University of Basel and the MDPI Sustainability Foundation are organizing the First Basel Sustainable Publishing Forum on 9th September 2019.

The aim of this event is to provide background and perspectives on Plan S to Learned Societies, which have to make well-informed decisions to transition their journals to Open Access (OA).

The BSPF will bring together several representatives of Learned societies, Plan S architects as well as representatives from various publishers and publishing platforms. After getting the big picture from cOAlition S, panel discussions will allow to better understand the diverse challenges that Learned societies are facing to transition their journals to OA as well as to identify sustainable, implementable and scalable solutions for successful Open Access transition.

For program details and registration, please follow the link below:
https://sciforum.net/conference/SustainableSolutionsToOpenAccess

MDPI will be attending Neuroscience 2019, to be held at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL, USA, 19–23 October 2019.

Join 30,000 colleagues from more than 70 countries at the world’s largest marketplace of ideas and tools for global neuroscience.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Brain Sciences
• Journal of Clinical Medicine
• Genes
• Cancers
• Diagnostics
• Pathogens
• Medicines
• International Journal of Molecular Sciences
• Healthcare
• Journal of Personalized Medicine
• Psych
• Cells
• Children
• Biomedicines

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #405). 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.sfn.org/Meetings/Neuroscience-2019.

We are pleased to welcome more universities from Poland, Italy, Germany, Brazil and other parts of the world to MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). A warm welcome to the institutions listed below, who have joined the Program in February and March this year.

Authors affiliated with these institutions can now enjoy a discount on the APC for papers accepted for publication in any MDPI journal. If you would like to learn more about our program, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap or email us at ioap@mdpi.com.

We are delighted to announce our participation in Jisc’s Publication Router project, as of March 2019.

Publications Router is a Jisc service that automatically sends notifications about research articles to institutions' systems such as their repositories or CRISs, since May 2015. Through this agreement, MDPI will provide Jisc with daily feeds and information regarding published articles, which will be gathered by their system and delivered to institutions also registered to this service. Nearly all of our articles are published within 15 days of acceptance, so institutions will receive them quite promptly.

The feed will include the full text of the published version of record, with no embargo, so the articles can be exposed immediately for public view. They are accompanied by rich metadata, including confirmation of the immediate CC BY licence, minimising the need for any manual intervention or checking.

For more information about Publications Router, you may contact Jisc’s central helpdesk at help@jisc.ac.uk. For any queries about MDPI’s institutional agreements and collaborations, you may get in touch with MDPI’s Institutional Engagement team at ioap@mdpi.com, which would be very happy to hear from further UK institutions.

Rigorous peer-review is the cornerstone of high quality academic publishing. Over 97,000 scholars served as reviewers for MDPI journals in 2018. We are extremely appreciative of all those who made a contribution to the editorial process in this capacity. At the beginning of every year, journal editorial offices publish a list all reviewers’ names to express our gratitude. In addition, this year the “MDPI Top Reviewer Awards” are announced, to recognize the very best reviewers for their expertise, dedication, high quality, and timely review reports. We are pleased to announce the following winners of the 2018 MDPI Top Reviewer Awards:

• Ali Behnood
• Andrea Pezzuolo
• Angela Gorgoglione
• Anna D'Auria
• Antonio D'Andrea
• Azhar Abbas
• Bogdan Zagajewski
• Chunhui Chen
• Dominika Głąbska
• Dominika Guzek
• Dragan Pamucar
• Francisco J. G. Silva
• Frank Li
• Gianluca Serafini
• Gyorgy Szekely
• Haozhi Pan
• Helvi Heinonen-Tanski
• José Manuel Gómez-Soberón
• Kathy Lewis
• Klara Kosova
• Luis N. López De Lacalle
• M. Z. Naser
• Malwina Tytła
• Masoume Amirkhani
• Matteo Ghidelli
• Moretti Laura
• Petra Schneider
• Roberto Cerchione
• Spyros Papaefthymiou
• Ştefan Cristian Gherghina

Since 2010, MDPI has run its own online submission system. More recently, we have made the software, with accompanying publishing services, available to other publishers as JAMS (Journal and Article Management System). We are now delighted to announce the launch of JAMS Journals, a standardized platform for operating open access journals at low cost.

JAMS Journals provides a comprehensive service, including a shared submission website, journal websites hosted at a URL provided by the publisher, and a full production service. There is a small setup fee and the cost for each published paper is just a few hundred Swiss francs.

The platform demonstrates that running an open access journal can be straightforward and affordable. The JAMS Journals platform is suitable for

• small publishers or groups of scholars looking to launch their own journal;
• existing publishers or societies seeking to explore open access options;
• publishers looking to convert an existing subscription journal to open access.

JAMS journals launches with two journals from Canadian-based publisher Etcetera Publications:

• Canadian Journal of Pesticides & Pest Management (http://www.cjppm.ca)
• Nanotechnology in Agriculture, Food & Environment (http://www.nanoafe.ca)

Dr AJ Al-Rajab (President of Etcetera Publications) comments:

“In the past few months, we were working on our project to launch new open access scientific journals in the field of agricultural and environmental sciences. We decided to go with JAMS for this venture because of the high quality of their services, reasonable prices, professionalism and easy communication. Our portfolio is expected to grow rapidly during 2019 to include more titles covering different areas in agriculture and environment. MDPI earned already our complete satisfaction and we are looking for a long term cooperation.”

Alongside the new platform, we continue to provide flexible, tailored journal management solutions for existing publishers. For any questions or to request a quotation, contact Dr. Constanze Schelhorn (constanze.schelhorn@mdpi.com).

2018 was a great year for preprints, with increasing numbers of authors looking to make their papers available online before peer review. Along with other preprint servers, our platform Preprints.org  saw an increase in the uptake from authors, and more than double the number of announced papers compared to 2017. In fact, we recently passed two important milestones: 8000 preprints online and 30,000 authors. 

We believe that the whole research community has the opportunity to benefit from work being available online as early as possible. We thank and congratulate our authors for supporting us to make this goal a reality.

In 2019, we will be looking carefully at how to provide better value for authors, maintain efficiency while growing in size, and make sure we remain well-connected with the research community. 

If you want to participate, you can consider screening preprints or joining our advisory board. And, of course, posting your own work.