Announcements

Toxins recently established a partnership with the EU funded project Mycokey. MycoKey is been funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme, Societal challenge 2 “Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine, maritime and inland water research and the bioeconomy challenge” – topic “Biological contamination of crops and the food chain”. Mycokey aims at generating innovative and integrated solutions and supporting stakeholders for an effective and sustainable mycotoxin management along food and feed chains. It will contribute to the reduction of mycotoxin contamination mainly in Europe and China, significant areas due to their increasing mycotoxin occurrence.

The 1st Mycokey International Conference Global Mycotoxin Reduction in the Food and Feed Chain will be held in Ghent, Belgium, 11–14 September 2017. The goal of this conference is to share knowledge at a global level, as well as to provide practical solutions to operators, directly involved in specific food and feed chains. This will be done through the development of tools for the prevention, monitoring, and reduction of mycotoxins in the field or during industrial processing, in a dynamic system able to consider variable data and information.

Toxins will be responsible for publishing the meeting abstracts and full text manuscripts. A Special Issue has been launched in Toxins, with Professors Sarah De Saeger and Antonio F. Logrieco serving as the Guest Editors. More information about the Special Issue can be found here.

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.

I'm delighted to announce that a new section "Uremic Toxins" has been established in Toxins. The section will cover all aspects of uremic toxin research, including but not limited to the identification and characterization of uremic toxins, with studies on their biological effects; generation; complications; removal and kinetics during removal; observational and controlled studies on the biological and clinical impact of concentration changes; and studies on the uremic metabolome, proteome, genome and microbiome.

The Editor-in-Chief for the section will be Professor Raymond Vanholder. Dr. Vanholder is Professor Emeritus at Ghent University and chairman of the European Kidney Health Alliance and the European Chronic Diseases Alliance.  He has published more than 700 papers on uremic toxicity and various topics related to clinical nephrology.

I'm confident that Dr. Raymond Vanholder's knowledge and experience will help us expand the journal's scope to uremic toxins, and maintain the high quality of the journal in the future.

The section information and editorial board can be found at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/toxins/sections/uremic_toxins.

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.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have joined MDPI's institutional membership program: Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA and the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. 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.

*Photo with copyright permission from ©Conventus.

The winner of the Best Poster Award for 2nd German Pharm-Tox Summit goes to Dr. Astrid Rohrbeck with her work Functional Role of Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD)-Binding Site of C3.

Here is the abstract of the planned paper:

Title: Functional Role of Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD)-Binding Site of C3

Authors: Astrid Rohrbeck, Sandra Hagemann, and Ingo Just

Affiliation: Institute of Toxicology, Hannover Medical School, Carl-Neuberg-Str. 1, D-30625 Hannover, Germany

Abstract:

Clostridium botulinum C3 exoenzyme selectively inactivates low molecular weight GTPases RhoA, B, and C by N-glycosidic ADP-ribosylation, resulting in changes of cellular functions such as motility, endocytosis, proliferation and apoptosis. Although C3 is a mere enzyme devoid of binding and translocation domains, C3 is able to effectively enter cells and inactivate Rho GTPases. However, recent data indicates that C3 is specifically endocytosed by the involvement of the intermediate filament vimentin.

Amino acid sequence alignment of different C3 isoforms revealed that C3 exoenzymes contain a RGD-motif. The Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) tripeptide is the major integrin binding site, present in a variety of integrin ligands. To check whether the RGD-motif of C3 is involved in binding to cells, we first performed a competition assay with C3 and RGD-peptide. Indeed, the GRGDNP peptide resulted in an approximate 50% displacement of C3 from the HT22 cells. Taken together, these findings indicate that the RGD-motif of C3 participates in the binding of C3 to intact cells.

Preprints.org is a platform run by MDPI that allows authors to make early versions of manuscripts available before peer review has been completed.

One of the major benefits of putting a preprint online is to get feedback before journal submission. Until now, however, the feedback has been on a voluntary basis. Preprints is delighted to be the first preprint server to collaborate with Publons to acknowledge substantial comments as reviews and give commentators the opportunity to receive credit for their efforts. 

When you add a comment to any article, there is a check box to click for it to appear on Publons. If you have already linked your account it will be passed on automatically. If you don't already have a Publons account, you will be contacted soon afterwards with instructions on how to create one.

We appreciate the enthusiasm and cooperation of Publons in this project and expect it to be of great benefit to authors and commenters alike.