Announcements

We will be attending the NIPS 2017, an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in all aspects of neural and statistical information processing and computation, and their applications. It will be held at Long Beach on 4-9 December 2017, representing the following MDPI open access journals:

Entropy
Symmetry
Information
Games
Computation
Algorithms
Mathematics
Mathematical and Computational Applications (MCA)
Data
Systems
Robotics
Machines
Big Data and Cognitive Computing (BDCC)
Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction (MAKE)

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #L102). 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://nips.cc/Conferences/2017.

     

Conference Address

Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center
300 E Ocean Blvd
Long Beach, CA 90802
USA

The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s popular blog about topics in academic publishing, Scholarly Kitchen, recently interviewed MDPI’s CEO, Dr. Franck Vazquez. He shared some thoughts and information on the past and future of MDPI and open access publishing in general:

“In the long run, we aim to anchor MDPI in research communities. We recently developed and launched the preprint platform Preprints, revamped our free-to-use conference hosting platform Sciforum, and are working on other projects, such as Scilit, our bibliographic database.”

Read the full interview here.

We are delighted to have welcomed 24 new participants to our Institutional Open Access Programme (IOAP) since the beginning of September this year. These are University libraries and Research Institutions located around the world; from the USA and Canada to the UK, and from Norway and Spain to Greece. Well respected Universities, such as the University of Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Arizona in the US, have signed up, while their researchers can now benefit from a 10% discount on the Article Processing Charges (APC) for any papers they publish in MDPI journals, at no cost for the library or the University.

We are more than happy to see the Open Access movement growing stronger and wider every day and we appreciate the vital role which librarians, repository managers, and other scholarly communications professionals play in the field. Our communication with and service to this community is, therefore, one of our principal priorities. The IOAP is our way to support academic and scientific Institutions as well as their scholars in managing, administrating, and publishing research in an Open Access world.

The IOAP set of free services, provided by MDPI to institutions that sign up, include:

• No fee for participants and no obligation to prolong after the initial 12 months. The participants may withdraw from the programme at any time, and we will also keep it free for the library for as long as they continue in the programme.
• Authors affiliated with the university will receive a discount on the article processing charge (APC).
• The institution is granted free access to the MDPI submission system and can receive free alerts of new submissions to our journals.
• By default, authors from the institution will continue to be invoiced directly unless the institution opts for central billing.
• Auto-archiving of papers into the institutions´ repository as long as it supports SWORD 1.3.

More details about the programme and a list of our current participant institutions can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap

Institutions which are interested to participate may do so online at: https://www.mdpi.com/ioap-form

 The full list of the Institutions that signed up in September is as follows:

1. University of Denver, USA
2. University of Colorado Boulder, USA
3. University of Arizona, USA
4. Institute of Metrology of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina
5. Middlebury College, USA
6. Touro College, USA
7. University of New Orleans, USA
8. University of Leicester, UK
9. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, USA
10. University of Strathclyde, UK
11. Cranfield University, UK
12. Hope College, USA
13. Oregon State University, USA
14. Drew University, USA
15. Swansea University, UK
16. University of South Florida, USA
17. University of Georgia, USA
18. Arizona State University, USA
19. University of Southern Mississippi, USA
20. Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada
21. Grinnell College, USA
22. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
23. University of Patras, Greece
24. Public University of Navarre, Spain

We are glad to announce that, on Friday 8 September 2017, the 1^st Molecules Medicinal Chemistry Symposium will be taking place in Barcelona at the School of Pharmacy and Food Sciences of the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Our open-access journal Molecules is the sponsor of this one-day monographic symposium that will address the topic of Emerging Drug Discovery Approaches against Infectious Diseases. In this sense, our intention is to provide a forum for discussion from novel biological targets and resistance mechanisms to the design and synthesis of new structural classes or the implementation of innovative therapeutic approaches against bacterial, protozoan, viral, and fungal infections. The event will gather together over 70 experts in the field of medicinal chemistry from more than 15 countries and 3 continents, mostly from academia but also from pharmaceutical industry and product development partnerships, therefore offering a very interesting platform for international networking in this field.

For more information please access the following ling: https://sciforum.net/conference/MMCS2017

Following this event, Barcelona will also be hosting two more MDPI Conferences this year:

• The 5^th International Symposium on Sensor Science will be held on 27–29 September 2017 at the AXA Convention Centre in Barcelona, Spain.
  This event, sponsored by our journal Sensors, will address the recent developments made in the field of sensor technology. To properly do so, the event will be split into 5 different sessions, each one of them focussing on the following different aspects of the field: chemosensors, bio-inspired and bio-based strategies for sensing and fluidics, biosensors, sensors for structures, and sensors for applications.
  The registration to attend the event is open until 7 September 2017.
  For more information please access the following link: https://sciforum.net/conference/i3s2017Barcelona.

• The First International Conference on Symmetry will be held on 16–18 October 2017 at the Parc Cientific de Barcelona (PCB), Barcelona, Spain.
  This conference, sponsored by our journal Symmetry, is an excellent opportunity to attend an event where cutting-edge ideas and knowledge on symmetry will be presented and shared. During the three days of the conference, a variety of subjects ranging from fields such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and biology will be brought together under the fundamental scientific phenomenon that is symmetry.
  The registration to attend the event is open until 25 September 2017.
  For more information please access the following link: https://sciforum.net/conference/symmetry2017

We are also pleased to announce that the following events will also be held in Barcelona in 2018:

• Viruses 2018 – Breakthroughs in Viral replication
  The event will take place at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona, on 7–9 February 2018.
  Early bird: 24 November 2017
  Abstract submission: 31 October 3017
  Registration: 22 January 2018
  For more information please access: https://sciforum.net/conference/Viruses-2018
  
• Polymers: Design, Function and Application
  The event will take place at the Faculty of Geology of the University of Barcelona on 22–23 March 2018
  Early bird: 15 December 2017
  Abstract Submission: 22 November 2017
  Registration: 2 March 2018
  For more information please access: https://sciforum.net/conference/polymers-2018
  
• Entropy 2018: From Physics to Information Sciences and Geometry
  The event will take place at the Faculty of Geology of the University of Barcelona on 14–16 May 2018.
  Early Bird: 14 February 2018
  Abstract Submission: 16 January 2018
  Registration: 25 April 2018
  For more information please access: https://sciforum.net/conference/Entropy2018-1

Congratulations to the authors Javier Monroy and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez from Universidad de Malaga, Spain, Victor Hernandez-Bennets, Han Fan and Achim Lilienthal from Örebro University, Sweden for publishing the 100,000th peer-reviewed article.

The article is published in the Chemical Sensors section of Sensors.

GADEN: A 3D Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments

Evermore pressing environmental concerns have led global actors and decision-makers to search for stricter emission monitoring approaches. As part of novel monitoring systems, robots with gas and environmental sensors are a promising solution. However, validation of such robotic inspectors is expensive, time consuming, and plagued by repeatability issues. In this article, we present GADEN (the short form for Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments), which combines gas dispersion and robotics simulation in a common framework. Developed under the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS), GADEN enables validation of sensing strategies with gas dispersion being simulated using computational fluid dynamics and filament dispersion theory. GADEN allows simulating complex, realistic, 3D environments for reproducible testing of robotic gas sensing algorithms. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we show that GADEN is a versatile and user-friendly evaluation tool and emphasize its enormous potential for the mobile robot olfaction community.

Read the full article here: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/7/1479/htm

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Symmetry:

The CiteScore, the new citation metric for journals covered in the Scopus® database, was released on 1 June 2017, reflecting the citation activity in 2016 for articles published during the three previous years. Please note that the list below does not contain all MDPI journals covered in Scopus. For the CiteScore to serve as a reliable metric at least three volumes of articles need to be indexed in Scopus; journals which have not met this criterion have been omitted here.

Ten MDPI journals received a CiteScore which is in the Top 10% of scores in at least one of the categories, while a further 21 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

We are pleased to announce that the Goethe University of Frankfurt, the Technical University of Hamburg (TU Hamburg-Harburg), as well as the Humboldt University of Berlin, in Germany, have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Primary authors from these instititions will benefit from a 10% discount on the article processing charges.

Additional details can be found on our institutional membership page.

As an open access publisher, we are keen to support openness and transparency in the research process. Citation data is very important for assessing the value of individual papers and the contribution of researchers. As such, we support the recently launched Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). The initiative recognizes that citations should be freely available and machine-readable. By doing so, authors gain the maximum benefit from having their work cited.

MDPI now uploads citation data with metadata uploaded to Crossref when registering digital object identifiers (DOIs) for published papers. We are delighted to take this step to support a truly open research environment.

Getting high quality review reports is critical for any journal’s editorial process. At MDPI we have put in place several measures to motivate reviewers and reward them for their work. We are proud of the quality of reviewer reports we receive and grateful for the hours put in by active researchers from across the globe.

Reviewers of MDPI’s largest journals can get recognition via Publons, a website dedicated to rewarding peer reviewers. They have now taken this one step further and launched the Publons Reviewer Academy to help train reviewers to provide useful feedback. Through the academy, researchers can be trained and tutored in various aspects of how to provide structured feedback that will be of genuine help to editors and authors. We support this initiative and recommend it to potential MDPI reviewers, especially early career researchers. See the Publons announcement for further information.

More information on reviewing for MDPI, including how to volunteer as a reviewer, can be found here.