Announcements

This serves to announce to our valued authors based in Japan that value-added tax, or consumption tax will now be imposed on article processing fees and other service fees for all papers submitted, or resubmitted (assigned new paper IDs), effective from 15 August 2021. The change is in accordance with the Japanese "Act for Partial Revision of the Income Tax Act and Other Acts" (Act No. 9 of 2015), which includes a revision of consumption taxation on cross-border supplies of services such as digital content distribution.

For additional information from the National Tax Agency please see here ("Cross-border supplies of electronic services").

Contact: Setsuko Nishihara, MDPI Tokyo

• “Grain-Size Distribution and Structural Characteristics of Varved Sediments from Lake Żabińskie (Northeastern Poland)”
  Maurycy Żarczyński et al.
  Quaternary 2019, 2(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2010008
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/1/8

• “Human Discovery and Settlement of the Remote Easter Island (SE Pacific)”
  Valentí Rull
  Quaternary 2019, 2(2), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2020015
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/2/15

• “The ‘Anthropocene Proposal’: A Possible Quandary and a Work-Around”
  Martin Bohle et al.
  Quaternary 2019, 2(2), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2020019
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/2/19

• “Speleothem Paleoclimatology for the Caribbean, Central America, and North America”
  Jessica L. Oster et al.
  Quaternary 2019, 2(1), 5; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2010005
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/1/5

• “Speleothems from the Middle East: An Example of Water Limited Environments in the SISAL Database”
  Yuval Burstyn et al.
  Quaternary 2019, 2(2), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2020016
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/2/16

• “The Asian Summer Monsoon: Teleconnections and Forcing Mechanisms—A Review from Chinese Speleothem δ¹⁸O Records”
  Haiwei Zhang et al.
  Quaternary 2019, 2(3), 26; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2030026
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/3/26

• “Late Quaternary Variations in the South American Monsoon System as Inferred by Speleothems—New Perspectives Using the SISAL Database”
  Michael Deininger et al.
  Quaternary 2019, 2(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2010006
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/1/6

• “Approach for Analysis of Land-Cover Changes and Their Impact on Flooding Regime”
  Badri Bhakta Shrestha
  Quaternary 2019, 2(3), 27; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2030027
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/3/27

• “Speleothem Records from the Eastern Part of Europe and Turkey—Discussion on Stable Oxygen and Carbon Isotopes”
  Zoltán Kern et al.
  Quaternary 2019, 2(3), 31; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2030031
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/3/31

• “The Use of Plant Macrofossils for Paleoenvironmental Reconstructions in Southern European Peatlands”
  Martin Souto et al.
  Quaternary 2019, 2(4), 34; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2040034
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/4/34

The journal Quaternary is launching a new position—Reviewer Board Member. The main responsibility of the new members of the Reviewer Board is to regularly provide timely high-quality reports on submitted manuscripts within their research fields. The responsibilities of the reviewers are available here.

Quaternary (ISSN 2571-550X) is an international, peer-reviewed (https://www.mdpi.com/editorial_process), open access journal of quaternary science published quarterly online by MDPI. Quaternary has been indexed in Scopus, Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI—Web of Science), GeoRef, and many other databases. The aims and scope of this journal can be found at Aims & Scope (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/quaternary/about). 

The benefits of joining our Reviewer Board are as follows: 

• We will announce your entry information on the journal's reviewer board;
• For each review, we will offer you a discount code if a comprehensive and timely report is provided. The vouchers can be used for your future publications in all MDPI journals;
• You may publish one paper per year with a 30% discount after standard peer-review in Quaternary;
• You will receive a personalized reviewer certificate;
• You will have the ability to adjust your review frequency based on your schedule in our system;
• You can verify and showcase your peer review and editorial contributions for our journal. 

If you are interested in this role or have any recommendations, please feel free to contact us by sending a short CV to the Quaternary Editorial Office (quaternary@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon. 

Quaternary Editorial Office

• “Elephant and Mammoth Hunting during the Paleolithic: A Review of the Relevant Archaeological, Ethnographic and Ethno-Historical Records”
  Aviad Agam et al.
  Quaternary 2018, 1(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat1010003
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/1/3 

• “Episodic Sedimentary Evolution of an Alluvial Fan (Huangshui Catchment, NE Tibetan Plateau)”
  Linman Gao et al.
  Quaternary 2018, 1(2), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat1020016
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/2/16 

• “What If the ‘Anthropocene’ Is Not Formalized as a New Geological Series/Epoch?”
  Valentí Rull
  Quaternary 2018, 1(3), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat1030024
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/3/24 

• “Setting the Stage: The Late Pleistocene Colonization of North America”
  Michael J. O’Brien
  Quaternary 2019, 2(1), 1; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2010001
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/1/1 

• “River Systems and the Anthropocene: A Late Pleistocene and Holocene Timeline for Human Influence”
  Martin R. Gibling
  Quaternary 2018, 1(3), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat1030021
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/3/21 

• “The Potential of Speleothems from Western Europe as Recorders of Regional Climate: A Critical Assessment of the SISAL Database”
  Franziska A. Lechleitner et al.
  Quaternary 2018, 1(3), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat1030030
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/3/30 

• “A Description of Two New Species of the Genus Rucervus (Cervidae, Mammalia) from the Early Pleistocene of Southeast Europe, with Comments on Hominin and South Asian Ruminants Dispersals”
  Roman Croitor
  Quaternary 2018, 1(2), 17; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat1020017
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/2/17 

• “Climatically-Controlled River Terraces in Eastern Australia”
  James S. Daley et al.
  Quaternary 2018, 1(3), 23; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat1030023
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/3/23 

• “Deciduous Tusks and Small Permanent Tusks of the Woolly Mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach, 1799) Found on Beaches in The Netherlands”
  Dick Mol et al.
  Quaternary 2018, 1(1), 7; https://doi.org/10.3390/quat1010007
  Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/1/7

In order to recognize outstanding papers that have been published in Quaternary, we are pleased to announce the Quaternary 2018–2019 Best Paper Awards. Five papers will be selected after thorough evaluation by the journal Award Committee led by the EiC, Prof. Dr. Jef Vandenberghe.

Each awardee will receive: (1) 300 CHF; (2) a certificate; (3) an offer to publish a paper free of charge after peer review in Quaternary in 2022.

Please check the eligibility criteria and requirements here. The winners will be announced on the journal website in March 2022.

Quaternary (ISSN 2571-550X) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal that covers all aspects of Quaternary Science, embracing the whole range of scientific fields related to geological, geographical, biological, physical, chemical, environmental and human sciences.

The Quaternary Editorial Team is pleased to announce this open call for Special Issue Proposals, which give a group of authors the opportunity to work on an interconnected set of papers on an innovative topic. We would like to solicit high-quality proposals that will be evaluated in a competitive procedure on a rolling basis throughout the year.

Proposals within the scope of the journal are welcome. For more details, please see: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/quaternary/about.

If you are interested in editing a Special Issue, please contact us before 31 December 2021. To propose or request further information, please contact the Quaternary Editorial Office (quaternary@mdpi.com).

Information to be provided in a proposal:

– A 200-word introduction to rationally explain the significance, novelty, technical advancement, and adherence to the scope of the journal of the proposed topic;

– A few keywords on the topic;

– A plan for obtaining quality papers or a list of at least three planned papers;

– A brief resume of the proposed Guest Editors together with their information (title, name, email, affiliation, personal website, keywords of interests);

– A proposed submission deadline (we normally run a Special Issue for 6–8 months).

The duties and benefits of acting as a Guest Editor are as follows:

– To re-define the title and scope of this Special Issue;

– To circulate the Call for Papers for the Special Issue and invite submissions;

– To make decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted or not based on the reports we collect;

– To promote the Special Issue and increase its visibility at related academic conferences.

– If 5 or more papers are published in this Special Issue, we can make a Special Issue book and send a hard copy to each Guest Editor.

The Editorial Office will take care of setting up the Special Issue website; arrange the promotional materials; assist with invitations to contribute papers; take care of the rest of the administrative tasks associated with peer review, including inviting reviewers, collating reports, contacting authors, and professional production before publication.

Please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office for further details and clarifications.

We look forward to receiving your creative proposals.

Quaternary Editorial Office

MDPI Books recently released Book Builder, a new online tool to conveniently arrange, design and produce an eBook from any content published in MDPI journals. Book Builder offers two functions: on the one hand (1) Selections, available to every registered user of MDPI; on the other hand (2) Special Issue Reprints, which can be used exclusively by Guest Editors of Special Issues.

Selections

In just a matter of a few clicks, all users are now able to assemble books from MDPI articles and receive instantaneous feedback in the form of a fully produced and compiled book (PDF), which can be downloaded or ordered as print copy. Selections can include any paper published with MDPI, picking and combining content from different journals and special issues.

This way, the user may for example choose to compile an ebook focusing around a particular topic, or assemble articles from a group of others.

We invite you to make yourself familiar with the new tool! The Book Builder can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/books/book_builder.

Special Issue Reprints

The Book Builder allows Guest Editors of MDPI journals to create a reprint from a successfully completed Special Issue or Topical Collection in book format. If you are a Guest Editor for an MDPI journal, you can use the new tool  to create an PDF document which includes all articles published in the Special Issue as well as a book cover and table of contents.

For Special Issues containing a minimum of 5 articles, the Guest Editor can request its publication on the MDPI Book platform. Published reprints are assigned an ISBN and DOI.

In addition to the PDF copy of the Reprint Book, as a token of our gratitude, MDPI offers every Guest Editor one (1) complimentary print copy (via print-on-demand). All contributors benefit from a discount on orders of any additional print copies, to share with colleagues or libraries or others.

Why choose MDPI Books?

In line with our organization's values, MDPI Books publishes all content in open access, promoting the exchange of ideas and knowledge in a globalized world. MDPI Books encompasses all the benefits of open access—high availability and visibility, as well as wide and rapid dissemination. MDPI Books are distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License, meaning as an author you retain the copyright for your work. In addition, with MDPI Books you can complement the digital version of your work with a high-quality printed counterpart.

If you are interested in editing a book volume or series, or have a monograph manuscript to be considered for publication, please submit your proposal online and look at our Information for Authors.

Contact: Laura Wagner, MDPI Books Manager (email)

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.

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)

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Quaternary 2020 Young Investigator Award is Dr. Oana Alexandra Dumitru.

Dr. Oana Alexandra Dumitru is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Department of Biology and Paleo-Environment at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA. Dr. Oana Alexandra Dumitru’s research interests are focused on past sea-level and climate changes, as well as radiometric dating. Dr. Oana Alexandra Dumitru received her PhD in 2019 and has an outstanding publication record. She has international experience and is clearly a rising star in the field of Quaternary science with excellent prospects. As a single applicant, Dr. Oana Alexandra Dumitru has secured funding of more than USD 279,300. This is an outstanding achievement in today’s competitive environment. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Oana Alexandra Dumitru for her outstanding achievements.

As the awardee, Dr. Oana Alexandra Dumitru will receive an honorarium of CHF 1000, an offer to publish a paper free of charge in 2021 in Quaternary after peer review, an engraved plaque and a certificate.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee Members for their evaluation of the abundant excellent nominations.

Prof. Dr. Jef Vandenberghe
Editor-in-Chief, Quaternary

/Quaternary/ Editorial Office
E-Mail: quaternary@mdpi.com
Quaternary https://www.mdpi.com/journal/quaternary

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/Quaternary/ (ISSN 2571-550X, *ESCI and Scopus Indexed*, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/quaternary) is an international open access journal that covers all aspects of Quaternary science, embracing the whole range of scientific fields related to geological, geographical, biological, physical, chemical, environmental and human sciences. The journal publishes reviews, research articles, communications, technical notes and essays. There is no restriction on the length of papers, and we encourage authors to publish their results in as much detail as possible.