Announcements

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)

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Universe 2020 Young Investigator Award is Dr. Lavinia Heisenberg.

Dr. Lavinia Heisenberg is a Professor of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. Dr. Lavinia Heisenberg’s research interests lie at the interface between gravitational physics, cosmology, particle physics, and computational astrophysics ranging from purely theoretical topics to more observational subjects. Dr. Lavinia Heisenberg received her PhD in 2014 and has an outstanding publication record, comprising 102 publications in total, among which 81 are published in peer-reviewed international journals, 10 pre-prints are currently under review, 8 are major review articles, 2 are contributions to proceedings of conferences, and one monograph has been published by Springer. Dr. Lavinia Heisenberg’s publications have attracted 5200 citations with a Hirsch index = 36, where 16 of them are top-cited and 12 of them have more than 50 citations. She is a rising star in the field of physics and the universe. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Heisenberg for her outstanding achievements.

As the awardee, Dr. Lavinia Heisenberg will receive an honorarium of 2000 CHF, an offer to publish a paper free of charge before the end of 2021 in Universe after peer-review, 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 many excellent nominations.

For more information about Universe awards, please see the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/universe/awards.

MDPI is proud to adopt the principles of the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) to support building equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications.

The C4DISC represents organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications and is focused on addressing issues of diversity and inclusion within the publishing industry.

MDPI’s Managing Editors encourage the Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, geographic location, sexual orientation, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and editors of MDPI journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.

Representatives from C4DISC meet monthly, and have started to implement initiatives to shed light and improve on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. Some of the initiatives include developing a joint statement of principles; conducting market research; providing training resources, best practices, toolkits, and documentation for our collective memberships; and establishing outreach programs, curricula, events, and publications.

The Coalition is committed to:

• eliminating barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination;
• creating and maintaining an environment that respects diverse traditions, heritages, and experiences;
• promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making;
• raising awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce;
• supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations.

At MDPI we have slightly revised the layout for articles to be published in the 2021 Volume, starting at the end of December 2020. As of today, the article templates available for download on ‘Instructions for Authors’ pages have been updated.

The most noticeable change can be found on the first page of the article, where a left-hand column has been created to include the following front matter elements: (i) the recommended citation style for the article, (ii) the publishing history, (iii) as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license used (iv) a standard note regarding affiliations. At the same time, the extra spacing on the left means the authors’ affiliations are now more clearly set apart than before. Other front matter key elements such as journal logo, article type, article title, authors, abstract and keywords remain unchanged.

The blank column on the left runs through all pages in an article; as a result, the main text is slightly more condensed, which improve reader friendliness for smaller screens. Small figures/tables are aligned on the left with standard indenture, while large figures/tables are centered and covering the full width of the page. The revised layout was applied in the article pictured below, to serve as an example:

1) Information is displayed in the left information bar.

2) In the main text, there is a blank column on the left.

3) Small tables/figures are aligned on the left, large tables/figures are centered.

We are pleased to acknowledge that many academic editors who have made an impact on MDPI journals as editorial board members, editors-in-chief, or section editors, are recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Highly Cited Researchers highlights the top 1% of researchers, by citations, in one or more of the 22 fields used in Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We offer our congratulations to 279 academic editors of MDPI journals who were recognized as the most influential scholars in their fields in 2020.

The full list of 2020 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed on https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2020/

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

  Photographer: Andy Holmes

Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe—the black hole. Roger Penrose showed that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation.

Sir Roger Penrose, who is a Professor at the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford, joined the Advisory Board of the journal Universe in October 2017 and continues to provide invaluable and constructive suggestions for the development of the journal. We congratulate Professor Penrose on receiving the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. We also extend our congratulations to Professor Reinhard Genzel and Professor Andrea Ghez who share this prize with Professor Penrose.

Join us in our effort to decrease the reviewing time and to improve the quality of published papers!

Since the inception of Universe (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/universe) in 2015, it has published more than 500 articles and has an impact factor of 1.752 (JCR 2019), and it has been indexed in many other important databases (Scopus, Astrophysics Data System, INSPIRE-HEP Search, and many more).

Universe has experienced continuous growth in recent years, and to maintain its high standards and to continue publishing high-quality papers, we need professional and expert scientists to become reviewers. Our reviewers are involved in the editorial process, and are essential to improving the quality and efficiency of the journal.

We are therefore recruiting scientists to join our reviewer board to provide professional comments for submissions that fall within the scope of Universe, as well as to conduct timely and efficient reviews, with the aim of making the journal stand out among other astrophysics and planetary science journals.

We hope this is of interest to you and look forward to our future collaboration.

Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Iorio
Editor-in-Chief
Universe

We are pleased to announce that the 1st Electronic Conference on Universe (Universe 2021), chaired by Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Iorio, Prof. Dr. James A. Isenberg, Prof. Dr. Gerald B. Cleaver, Prof. Dr. Gonzalo J. Olmo, Dr. Antonio Padilla, Dr. Paolo Giacomelli and Dr. Lijing Shao, et al., will be held on https://ecu2021.sciforum.net/, from 22 to 28 February 2021.

This conference aims to provide leading scientists working in the field of gravitation, cosmology, field theory, high energy physics, and astronomy with a robust common platform, in which to share and discuss the latest research, and to promote the advancement of this exciting and rapidly changing field. We hope to encourage discovery across the discipline, as we cover the following broad themes, as listed below:

• Session 1: General Relativity and Gravitation
• Session 2: Quantum Field Theories
• Session 3: Black Holes
• Session 4: Dark Matter and Dark Energy
• Session 5: High Energy Physics
• Session 6: Compact Objects
• Session 7: Deep-Space Probes
• Session 8: The Universe of Andrei Sakharov
• Session 9: Teaching relativity and modern physics in general

We proudly invite the global community of scholars to join Universe 2021, to present their latest research and development, and share novel ideas on the multidisciplinary aspects of the research and development of astronomy and astrophysics. Thanks to the flexibility of our innovative electronic platform, you are welcome both to upload and present your work, and to attend the conference, completely free of charge. We are also considering creating a Special Issue for selected conference papers in our journal Universe (IF: 1.752; ISSN 2218-1997; https://www.mdpi.com/journal/universe/special_issues/ecu2021). For papers published in the Special Issue, if one does get created, there will be no article processing charge.

Universe 2021 offers you the opportunity to participate in an international scholarly conference without the concerns and expense of travelling—all you need is access to the Internet. During the conference period, you will be able to upload papers, posters, presentations (including videos), comment on other presentations, and otherwise engage with fellow scholars in real time. In this way, the conference offers a novel opportunity to exchange opinions and views within the scholarly community, and to discuss papers and the latest research in a discussion forum.Timeline:

Abstract Submission: 20 November 2020

Notification of Acceptance: 31 December 2020

Proceedings Paper Submission Deadline: 15 January 2021

Conference: 22–28 February 2021

We look forward to receiving your research papers and to welcoming you to this 1st Electronic Conference on Universe.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Kind regards,

Conference Secretariat
Ms. Danielle Yao
Mr. Abbot Yan
E-Mail: ecu2021@mdpi.com