Announcements

MDPI will be attending the 11^th International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation, which will be held from 29 November to 2 December 2021, in Lloret de Mar, Spain.

The conference will be focused on the following topics: algorithms for wireless sensor networks; applications of location awareness and context detection; benchmarking, assessment, evaluation, standards; health and wellness applications; human motion monitoring and modeling; indoor maps, indoor spatial data models and indoor mobile mapping, and 3D building models; indoor positioning, navigation, and tracking methods; innovative systems; location-based services and applications; privacy and security for ILS; robotics and UAV; seamless systems; self-contained sensors; user requirements for location-based systems; wearable and multi-sensor systems, etc.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Sensors (ISSN: 1424-8220);
• Remote Sensing (ISSN: 1424-8220);
• Drones (ISSN: 2504-446X);
• ASI (ISSN: 2571-5577);
• Systems (ISSN: 2079-8954).

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: https://ipin-conference.org/2021/index.html.

Founded in 1996, MDPI was one of the first fully Open Access publisher. Over 25 years MDPI has grown to become the largest Open Access publisher globally, publishing over 160,000 articles across more than 350 journals in 2020. At the core, MDPI was founded in response to a pressing need of fast publication and inclusion. The scholar was set at the centre of the publication process for the first time. Acting as a service provider, rather than a product provider, MDPI exists to help scientists achive their objective to disseminate research results. At MDPI, we believe scientists deserve a better service from the publishing world.

The International Open Access Week (Open Access Week), founded by the SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Alliance and student partners in 2008, has been successfully running for 13 years. As an advocate and pioneer of open access publishing, MDPI actively responds to the call of International Open Access Week. This year’s theme of “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity” highlights the Recommendation’s call for equitable participation from all authors and readers.

For the last 25 years, MDPI has been committed to disseminating open research. Here is a video showing MDPI’s Commitment to Equity, Inclusion and Diversity for More than 25 Years.

International Open Access Week is an important opportunity to catalyze new conversations, create connections across and between communities that can facilitate this co-design, and advance progress in the building of more equitable foundations for opening knowledge—discussions and actions that need to be continued, year in and year out. MDPI has always aimed to provide professional and efficient publishing services to scholars around the world.

Our mission is to make scientific research accessible to everyone; this year, we interview and hold discussions with open science ambassadors on how to build an equal and inclusive environment for open science. Academic editors help us collaborate with more institutions to advocate for open access ideas.

Read our anniversary blog post: "Sharing 'Collective Human Knowledge': The Benefits of Open Access Publication"

Besides this, our scientific community is a key driver of our success and MDPI’s remarkable growth. Despite the pandemic, we have prepared online conferences and workshops to gather scholars from different communities.

The Basel Sustainable Publishing online forum provides an equal opportunity for stakeholders and researchers from multi-cultural environments to exchange ideas and eliminate barriers to participation.

Conference date: 25 October 2021, online
Conference website: https://bspf2021.sciforum.net/
Main topics: MDPI discusses the current dilemma of open access science from various perspectives such as governments, libraries, and publishers, and related measures on how to change the status quo of discrimination from a global perspective.

We aim to support equality, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications. We collaborate with universities and key laboratories and have scholarly communications with researchers, teachers, and students on open access workshops.

• 25 October 2021
  Energies journal and Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

• 28 October 2021
  Machines journal and State Key Laboratory of Traction Power, Southwest Jiaotong University

• 29 October 2021
  Processes journal and Beijing Institute of Technology

• 29 October 2021
  Coatings journal and Wuhan University of Technology

MDPI is committed to providing open access and high-quality publishing services for scholars and promoting rapid dissemination of academic achievements. We hope to promote the practices and policies of open access publishing and diversify the dissemination of academic achievements.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Fumio Yamazaki, Prof. Dr. Stuart Phinn, Dr. Chris Roelfsema and Prof. Dr. Lefei Zhang have been appointed Section Editors-in-Chief of the Sections “Earth Observation for Emergency Management”, “Ecological Remote Sensing”, “Coral Reefs Remote Sensing” and “AI Remote Sensing” in Remote Sensing (ISSN: 2072-4292).

Name: Prof. Dr. Fumio Yamazaki

Affiliation: National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, Tsukuba, Japan

Interests: Natural hazards, disaster monitoring, damage assessment, SAR and earthquakes

Name: Prof. Dr. Stuart Phinn

Affiliation: School of SEES, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane 4072, Australia

Interests: Remote sensing

Name: Dr. Chris Roelfsema

Affiliation: Remote Sensing Research Centre, School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia

Interests: Remote sensing of coastal and marine environments, conservation and management of coral reef and seagrass ecosystems and improving marine field calibration and validation approaches of remote sensing imagery

Name: Prof. Dr. Lefei Zhang

Affiliation: School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

Interests: Pattern recognition, machine learning, image processing and remote sensing

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Fumio Yamazaki, Prof. Dr. Stuart Phinn, Dr. Chris Roelfsema and Prof. Dr. Lefei Zhang as they start their new roles as Section Editors-in-Chief and we look forward to them leading Remote Sensing to achieve many more milestones.

Remote Sensing Editorial Office

Rigorous peer-review is the cornerstone of high-quality academic publishing. Over 369,916 scholars served as reviewers for MDPI journals in 2020. 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 of all reviewers’ names to express our gratitude. In addition, this year, the MDPI Top Reviewer Award was announced, to recognize the very best reviewers for their expertise and dedication, and their high-quality, and timely review reports. We are pleased to announce the following winners of the 2020 MDPI Top Reviewer Award:

• Adriana Burlea-Schiopoiu;
• Alban Kuriqi;
• Álvaro González-Vila;
• Alessandro Alaimo;
• Alexey Beskopylny;
• Alexander Yu Churyumov;
• Alberto Fernández-Isabel;
• Andrea Mastinu;
• Antonios N. Papadopoulos;
• Anton Rassõlkin;
• Antonio Humberto Hamad Minervino;
• Arkadiusz Matwijczuk;
• Artur Słomka;
• Baojie He;
• Bartłomiej Potaniec;
• Bojan Đurin;
• Camilo Arturo Rodriguez Diaz;
• Carmelo Maria Musarella;
• Chiachung Chen;
• Chiman Kwan;
• Cristian Busu;
• Danil Pimenov;
• Dan-Cristian Dabija;
• Delfín Ortega-Sánchez;
• Demetrio Antonio Zema;
• Denis Butusov;
• Elena Lucchi;
• Gaurab Dutta;
• Livia Anastasiu;
• M. R. Safaei.

For more information about how to become a reviewer of MDPI journals, please see: www.mdpi.com/reviewers.

UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. In 2020 the SDG Publishers Compact was launched, aimed to inspire publishers and accelerate progress to achieve the 17 goals by 2030. Members of the programme are committed to support the publication of materials that will promote and inspire actions towards SDGs.

MDPI is an eager advocate of SDGs and has already been supporting the programme by creating Special Issues and publishing a series of books on SDGs prior to joining the Compact in 2021. MDPI's Sustainability Foundation initiated the World Sustainability Awards in 2016. We fully support UN's goals to promote sustainable actions that make the world a better place for all and, as part of its commitment, we will focus our actions on SDG10: Reduced Inequalities whilst promoting all 17 SDGs. For more details, please visit the programme’s website: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sdg-publishers-compact/.

Joining this initiative was a unanimous decision. MDPI has in its core values the dissemination of science for all, breaking the wall between research access and under-represented members of the scientific community and the general population. To support this initiative further and continue to support under-represented scientists, MDPI will take a series of actions that will be announced once ready.

The first action MDPI takes is to nominate Dr. Liliane Auwerter as the coordinator of the programme. Dr. Auwerter studied Environmental Process Technology (UTFPR, Brazil), obtained her MSc degree in Water and Environmental Engineering (University of Surrey, UK) and in 2020 completed her PhD in self-healing low-friction materials for water transport (Imperial College London, UK), always focusing on diverse scientific projects that would potentially bring sustainability to industrial processes. As a student in Brazil, she engaged in volunteering activities focused on environmental education and took part in the Millennial Development Goals meetings held at the university.

For more information, please contact:
Dr. Liliane Auwerter
Scientific Officer
liliane.auwerter@mdpi.com

MDPI will be attending the 6th Optoelectronics Global Conference (OGC 2021), hosted by the IEEE Photonics Society, Guangzhou Photonics Chapter, and Southern University of Science and Technology, which will be held from Wednesday, 15 September, until Saturday, 18 September, 2021, at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center, China.

OGC aims to promote the interaction and exchange of various disciplines among professionals in academia and industry at home and abroad. In addition, it also serves to turn technologies into industrial applications. OGC will be an ideal platform for scholars, researchers and professionals to exchange insights and discuss the development of the optoelectronics industry. It will be a perfect gathering to learn about new perspectives, technologies and trends which might push the boundaries of technology and eventually create a broader future for optoelectronics applications.

The topics covered will include precision optics, optical communications, lasers, infrared applications, and fiber sensors.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Photonics
• Nanomaterials
• Electronics
• Remote Sensing

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://www.ipsogc.org/index.html.

It is very important to us to grant Remote Sensing Outstanding Contribution Series Awards to papers published in our journal. The first winners are listed as below.

• “Transferring Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for the Scene Classification of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery” (3390/rs71114680)
  by Fan Hu, Gui-Song Xia, Jingwen Hu and Liangpei Zhang

• “A Non-Stationary 1981–2012 AVHRR NDVI_3gTime Series” (3390/rs6086929)
  by Jorge E. Pinzon and Compton J. Tucker

We believe that these two papers have contributed greatly to the field of remote sensing. To expand the influence of these awards and to select winning papers based on more scientific data, we have decided to change the regulations, and give out the awards every four years. This means that the next edition will be in 2024, and the candidate articles were published in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

We hope that we can support authors in the field of remote sensing by granting these awards. 

Remote Sensing Editorial Office

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

We are pleased to inform you that with the support of our authors, editors, and reviewers, Remote Sensing received an increased Journal Impact Factor of 4.848 and a 5-Year Impact Factor of 5.353. This was released in the recent Journal Citation Reports®.

Remote Sensing has achieved six consecutive years of growth in its Impact Factor. We are grateful to all the scholars who have witnessed the journal’s growth with us.

Given the rank ordered by the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI)*, Remote Sensing now ranks 9/50 (Q1) in the “Remote Sensing” category, 7/31 (Q1) in the “Imaging Science & Photographic Technology” category, 53/302 (Q1) in the “Environmental Sciences” category and 43/235 (Q1) in the “Geosciences, Multidisciplinary” category.

In the rank ordered by Journal Impact Factor, Remote Sensing ranks 27/199 (Q1) in the “Geosciences, Multidisciplinary” category, 10/32 (Q2) in the “Remote Sensing” category, 8/29 (Q2) in the “Imaging Science & Photographic Technology” category, and 76/274 (Q2) in the “Environmental Sciences” category.

Thank you for your continuous support of Remote Sensing!

*The Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) is the average Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) of citable items (articles & reviews) published by a journal over a recent three-year period. The average JCI in a category is 1. Journals with a JCI of 1.5 have 50% more citation impact than the average in that category. It may be used alongside other metrics to help you evaluate journals.

We are delighted to announce that our journal Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292) has been approved for coverage within three new categories of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR): “Environmental Sciences”, “Geosciences Multidisciplinary”, and “Imaging Science & Photographic Technology”.