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.

We are pleased to announce that the winners of 2019 Travel Award, sponsored by MDPI and Publications: Jiangen He and Olmo van den Akker.

Jiangen He is a PhD student in the Department of Information Science at Drexel University, USA. Jiangen’s research focuses on the development of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of how science advances, especially through machine learning, visual analytics, and predictive analysis. He is keen on bringing together theoretical and computational insights and inspirations to the research community of quantitative studies of science. Jiangen is the lead author in a paper submission to 17th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI 2019), entitled ‘The Citations of Papers with Conflicting Reviews and Confident Reviewers.’ This work should be of interest and potentially thought-provoking in the studies of scholarly communication and peer review.

Olmo van den Akker is a PhD student at the meta-research group at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He has been an active participant in the debate around Plan S, the plan of major European funding agencies to make all research funded by them openly accessible from 2021 onwards. Olmo is also a member of the Platform for Young Meta-Scientists, a group of early career researchers that wants to collaborate on improving science. He is working on several projects, such as studying researchers’ interpretations of statistical results and the efficacy of preregistration, and he is expected to present the preliminary results of this preregistration project at the Metascience Symposium 2019 at Stanford University.

It has certainly been a difficult decision, with such a collection of high-quality applications for the awards. We would like to thank all of the applicants for submitting such a range of diverse and fascinating research topics and congratulate the winners for their accomplishment.

Dr. Tony Ross-Hellauer
Editor-in-Chief
On behalf of the Award Committee

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

In addition to MDPI journals who received updated CiteScores for 2018, the titles listed below were added in Scopus recently and therefore received a first CiteScore in May 2019, based on last year's citation activity in the database.

For almost all of the newly added MDPI titles, their CiteScore ranks in the upper 50% of the distribution (Q1 or Q2) in at least one of the research areas. The following titles rank in the top 25% cited journals based on CiteScore: Actuators; Biomedicines; Coatings; Cosmetics; Fermentation; Journal of Fungi; Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity; Nanomaterials; and Publications.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

New CiteScore for MDPI Journals

We are inviting applications for two Travel Awards for postdoctoral, Ph.D. and Master’s researchers to attend an international conference of their choice between September 2019 and August 2020. The awards will consist of 800 Swiss Francs each, and may be used for registration, travel, or accommodation.

The awardee will be determined by an evaluation committee, chaired by Dr. Tony Ross-Hellauer, and also including Ms. Isabel Bernal, Dr. Joanna Richardson, Dr. Robert Campbell, Dr. Svetla Baykoucheva, and Dr. Yongyan Li.

Candidates must fulfil the following criteria:

• Postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. or Master’s students undertaking scholarly publishing related research.
• They must present their own, original work as a poster or oral presentation at the conference for which the travel award application is being made.

Applicants are required to submit the following documents (the entire application package should be submitted as a PDF file):

– An outline of current work, how it fits within the aims and scope of Publications, and how it will contribute to the advancement of the research field to which it pertains (<2 pages).

– CV, including a complete list of education, publications and presentations (<10 pages).

– The conference to be attended, a copy of the abstract and acceptance letter or anticipated date of decision.

– A letter of recommendation from their supervisor, research director or department head (1 page).

There is no need to fill out an official form nor to have a prior submission or publication in Publications. The awardees should explicitly and formally acknowledge the travel award in their presentation at the conference. Any questions about the Travel Award can be directed to publications@mdpi.com.

Please send your applications to publications@mdpi.com by 30 June 2019. The winners will be announced by the end of July 2019.

Publications Editorial Office
St. Alban-Anlage 66
CH-4052, Basel, Switzerland
www.mdpi.com/journal/publications

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