Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Francisco José García-Peñalvo has joined Software as an Editorial Board Member.

Prof. Dr. Francisco José García-Peñalvo is a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Automation at the University of Salamanca (USAL), with three six-year periods of research, one six-year period of transferring and innovation, and four five-year periods of recognized teaching. He received the Gloria Begué award for teaching excellence in 2019. He was also a Distinguished Professor at the School of Humanities and Education at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, and a Researcher of International Impact at the Universidad Nacional San Agustín, Arequipa, Peru. Since 2006 he has been the head of the Research Group Recognized by the USAL GRIAL (research GRoup on InterAction and eLearning), a group that is a Consolidated Research Unit of the Junta de Castilla y León Government (UIC 81). He was included in the University of de Stanford’s World's Top 2% Scientists list (2021) https://doi.org/10.17632/btchxktzyw.3. He was the Vice-Dean of Innovation and New Technologies of the Faculty of Sciences of the USAL between 2004 and 2007 and the Vice-Rector of Technological Innovation of this University between 2007 and 2009. He is currently the Rector's Delegate for Virtual Teaching and the Coordinator of the Doctorate Program in Education in the Knowledge Society at USAL. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journals Education in the Knowledge Society and Journal of the Information Technology Research, and Associate Editor of many journals, with a special mention to the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports. He has published more than 100 research papers in JCR-indexed journals (53 Q1).

For more detailed information on his publications, these are the public links to his profiles in Google Scholar (http://goo.gl/sDwrr0), Publons (https://bit.ly/2u2FN5l) and ORCID (http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9987-5584).

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Ricardo Colomo-Palacios has joined Software as a new Editorial Board Member.

Prof. Dr. Ricardo Colomo-Palacios is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Communication at Østfold University College. He is currently the director of the Information Systems and Software Engineering research group. He acquired his Ph.D. in computer science at the Universidad Politécnica of Madrid (2005). He also holds an MBA from the Instituto de Empresa (2002). He has been working in the industry for ten years as a software engineer, project manager, and software engineering consultant in several companies, including being a Spanish IT leader at INDRA. After that, he joined full time academia, firstly at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, and from 2014 at Østfold University College, Norway.

His works have been published in top journals of the discipline and he has also published more than 30 Special Issues in journals such as Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Software Quality Journal, Journal of Global Information Technology Management, Science of Computer Programming, and Future Generation Computer Systems or Computer Standards & Interfaces, to name some of them. This editorial service is also tangible in his role as associate editor in IEEE Software, Computer Standards & Interfaces or IEEE Access. Prof. Dr. Colomo-Palacios is also engaged in the organization of many international conferences and workshops in the software arena.

His current research areas include software engineering management, people in software projects, software project management, business software, software and services process improvement, securing software, and cyber security. His works have been cited on a regular basis and, for instance, his citation results in Google Scholar are above 7300, and his h-index is 48.

In 2018, he received the Research Prize granted by Østfold University College as the most distinguished scholar of that year. He received several recognitions as an author of papers in journals and conferences, citing the award for Best Paper published in IET software in 2014 as one of his most important recognitions.

Software (ISSN: 2674-113X) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of software engineering. It publishes reviews, regular research papers, and communications. Our aim is to publish timely experimental and theoretical research results in a rapid and readily accessible manner.

The Software editorial team is pleased to announce an open call for Special Issue proposals. This Special Issue will offer a group of authors the opportunity to work on an interconnected set of papers on an innovative topic. We welcome high-quality proposals that will be evaluated in a continuous selection process throughout the year.

In order to ensure that the topic of your proposal is within the scope of Software, please read the aim and scope of Software at the following website:
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/software/about.

Proposals for Special Issues should be sent to the Editorial Office (software@mdpi.com) or submitted via the following link:
https://www.mdpi.com/journalproposal/sendproposalspecialissue/software.

The following information should be provided in a proposal:

• A 150–200-word summary that clearly states the significance, novelty, technical advancement, and adherence to the scope of the journal of the proposed topic;
• A list of 5–10 keywords relating to the topic;
• 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 (a Special Issue will usually be open for submissions for 6–8 months);
• A list of at least 20 potential contributors or a list of 8 planned papers.

As a Guest Editor, you would be responsible for:

• Inviting your peers to submit papers to be published in your Special Issue. These papers will be able to take advantage of the high publicity offered by our open access publishing, our rapid and high-quality peer-review process, and immediate publication after acceptance;
• Checking the suitability of abstracts/manuscripts submitted to the Special Issue;
• Making pre-check decisions regarding whether to send a new submission to peer review;
• Making final decisions regarding whether to accept or reject a paper based on peer-review outcomes.

As a Guest Editor, you would have the following privileges:

• A certificate of recognition as a Guest Editor of Software;
• Publishing one paper free of charge in your Special Issue;
• Inviting authors to submit high-quality papers to be published in your Special Issue free of charge or with certain discounts;
• If the Special Issue is successful and features at least 10 manuscripts accepted after full peer review, we can organize it into a printed book and send you a free copy as a gift.

Editorial Office’s role:

The Editorial Office will set up the Special Issue website, arrange the promotional material, assist with invitations for paper contributions, and take care of the administrative tasks associated with peer review, including inviting reviewers, collating reports, contacting authors, and arranging professional production before publication.

Please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office (software@mdpi.com) if you are interested and would like further details or clarification.

We look forward to receiving your proposals.

Software Editorial Office

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Hironori Washizaki, has joined Software as a new Editorial Board Member.

Hironori Washizaki is a Professor and the Associate Dean of the Research Promotion Division at Waseda University in Tokyo and a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Informatics. He also works in the industry as an Outside Director of SYSTEM INFORMATION and eXmotion.

He received his Ph.D. in information and computer science from Waseda University in 2003. His research interests include systems and software engineering. He has published more than 150 research papers in refereed international journals and conferences, including Computer, TETC, IoT-J, EMSE, SCICO, ICSE, and ASE. He has led numerous academic-industry joint research and funded projects in software requirements, software design, software reuse, and patterns, software quality assurance, software development process and management, AI/machine learning software engineering, and ICT/programming education. Since 2017, he has led a large-scale grant at MEXT, called enPiT-Pro SmartSE, which encompasses recurrent professional education in IoT, AI, software engineering, and business.

He has been the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) Vice President for Professional and Educational Activities since 2021 and IEEE-CS Board of Governors (BoG) member. He is spearheading the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) evolution project. He has also served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), Steering Committee Member of the IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), Editor of the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (IJSEKE), Editorial Board Member of Education Sciences, Editorial Board Member of Software, Associate Editor of Frontiers in Computer Science, and Advisory Committee Member of the IEEE-CS flagship conference COMPSAC. He is a Professional Member of IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu. He has served as the general and program chair of major conferences, including ICST, CSEE&T, APSEC, AsianPLoP, and COMPSAC SIoT.

Since 2015, he has been the Convener of ISO/IEC/JTC1 SC7/WG20 to standardize bodies of knowledge and professional certifications, including the development of the ISO/IEC 24773 series. Furthermore, he has contributed to software engineering and the general computing professional community in Japan, Asia, and globally. He has served as Chair of the IEEE-CS Japan Chapter. He has served as a Steering Committee Member for the Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC). He has served as an Asia Liaison at SEKE since 2010. He is also active in the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), where he has served as the Editor of its journal and Chair of the Special Interest Group of Software Engineering (SIGSE).

You can contact him at washizaki@waseda.jp and http://www.washi.cs.waseda.ac.jp/.

It is our great honor to congratulate the Editorial Board Members and Editors in MDPI's journals who have been distinguished as 2021 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate, according to Web of Science data. We herewith express our gratitude for the immense impact the named researchers continue to make on scientific progress and on our journals' development.

Clarivate's annual list of Highly Cited Researchers^TM identifies the most highly cited scientists for the past decade. Their impactful papers are among the top 1 per cent in the citation distribution of one or more of 22 fields analyzed in the "Essential Science Indicators", distinguishing them as hugely influential among their peers.

The full list of 2021 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed at the following webpage in the Web of Science^TM https://recognition.webofscience.com/awards/highly-cited/2021/.

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

DCCS 2022 seeks to provide an international venue to discuss the advanced discoveries and emerging trends related to the dependability of complex systems in both the academic society and the industrial world. This workshop will not only explore how we can apply the emerging dependability theories and techniques to model and evaluate the complex systems, but also the methods or tools for localizing and fixing the system vulnerabilities to improve the system dependability. We are excited about your joining!

Topics addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Software and hardware reliability;
• Software aging and rejuvenation;
• Software testing, verification, and validation;
• Techniques and approaches for safety-critical systems;
• Dependability measurement, modeling, evaluation, and tools;
• Dependability techniques and methodologies for complex systems;
• Dependable systems design;
• Self-healing, self-protecting, and self-adaptive systems;
• Fault-tolerant techniques;
• Quality assurance in server systems, cyber-physical systems, learning-based systems, etc;
• Internet of things (IoT) architectures, protocols, security and privacy;
• Modeling and simulation of complex systems;
• Analysis of software faults/bugs, errors, and failures;
• Fault localization for complex bugs;
• Repairing and re-engineering for complex systems;
• Studies on non-deterministic bugs, aging-related bugs, etc.;
• Analytical, empirical, and experimental studies of any of the above topics.

For further information, please visit the conference website: https://www.dccs2022.com/.

Related Special Issue is open for submissions:

Special Issue "Dependable Computing and Security for Software Systems"

We are pleased to announce that the new Editorial Board Member, Prof. Dr. Jerry Zeyu Gao, has recently joined Software.

Prof. Dr. Jerry Zeyu Gao is a professor at the Department of Computer Engineering at San Jose State University. He is currently the director of the SJSU Research Center on Smart Technology, Computing, and Complex Systems. He has had over 24 years of academic research and teaching experience and over 10 years of industry working and management experience in software engineering and IT development applications. He has published three technical books and over a hundred (280) publications in IEEE/ACM journals, magazines, international conferences, and workshops. In the last 10 years, Prof. Dr. Gao has played a major role in organizing many international conferences and workshops as a conference co-chair, program co-chair, and workshop co-chair, including IEEEAI Test, IEEE Smart World Congress, IEEE Smart City Innovation 2017, SEKE, IEEE Mobile Cloud, IEEE Big Data Service, and IEEE SOSE. In 2021, Prof. Dr. Gao served as the steering committee board chair for the IEEE International Congress on Intelligent Service-Oriented Systems Engineering (IEEECISOSE) and the Steering Committee Board Members for IEEE Smart World Congress.

His current research areas include cyber-physical systems for smart cities, smart agriculture, and wildfires, intelligent test automation and quality assurance services, mobile cloud computing and services, and software engineering. Prof. Dr. Gao’s research and publications have received many citations in the research community, for example, his Google Scholar citation results are above 7400, and his ResearchGate reading reaches over 227,000. 

In 2010, Prof. Dr. Jerry Zeyu Gao was recognized by the University of Texas at Arlington as a distinguished alumnus for the College of Engineering on its 50th anniversary. In 2011, he was awarded a KSI Fellowship in SEKE2011. In 2013, Prof. Dr. Gao received the College of Engineering Faculty Award for Excellence Scholarship. Recently, Prof. Dr. Gao has been recommended and listed as Marquis’s American Who's Who 2020-2021, and Marquis’s Industry Leaders in 2021.

Academic editors play a crucial role in leading our journals and ensuring that each article undergoes a robust and timely peer-review. With the launch of Topics this year and addition of Topic Editors to our family of academic editors, we decided it would be a good time to restructure our academic boards, thus providing more clarity and support for each role. MDPI is pleased to announce the launch of a new position—Topical Advisory Panel Member, that will replace the previous position of Topics Board Member. The Topical Advisory Panel will be comprised of early career researchers eager to gain experience in editorial work.

The main responsibility of the new members of the Topical Advisory Panel is to regularly provide support to Guest Editors, Topic Editors, and Section Board Members. The responsibilities of the Topical Advisory Panel are available here: https://www.mdpi.com/editors.

Each year, the members’ performances are evaluated, and outstanding members are promoted to the Editorial Board by the Editor-in-Chief.

To qualify as a Topical Advisory Panel Member, applicants must:

• Have expertise and experience in the field related to the journal;
• Have received a Ph.D. in the last 10 years, approximately;
• Have at least 6-8 published papers in the last 5 years as first author or corresponding author;
• Currently hold an independent research position in academia or a government institute.

If you are interested in this role, please contact the editorial office by email.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

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.

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.