Announcements

MDPI is pleased to announce that we now display the co-authors’ email addresses in addition to the corresponding author’s email address on the webpage of published papers, protected by Captcha. For more information about this change, please visit the journal’s instructions for authors page. 

We believe this change will facilitate academic discussions and advance our cause of open science and research. The corresponding authors are responsible for communicating with their co-authors and indicating in our system (https://susy.mdpi.com/) if co-authors would prefer for their email addresses not to be displayed.

On 9 February 2023, Clarivate, a global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics, added the Preprint Citation Index to the Web of Science platform, streamlining the research process by allowing researchers to locate and link to preprints alongside other trusted content in the database.

The Preprint Citation Index will act as a bridge to connect cutting-edge preprints with peer-reviewed journal articles published within the Web of Science Core Collection. Alerts can be easily set to monitor new research across several repositories and authors will also be able to include preprints on their Web of Science Research Profile to more accurately display their various research outputs.

As of its launch, the Preprint Citation Index will provide nearly two million preprints from various repositories, including MDPI’s own Preprints.org.

MDPI's Preprints Platform – Preprints.org

To advance Open Science and the fast dissemination of research, MDPI offers researchers a free multidisciplinary preprint platform. Preprints.org accepts submissions from all research areas and offers authors high visibility, permanent archiving, article-level Metrics and immediately citable content by assigning a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to all preprints.

During submission to any MDPI journal, authors have the option to share their research as a preprint. After an initial screening, the manuscript is available online in 48 hours or less. Once online, preprints can be downloaded, shared, commented on, and cited, providing authors maximum visibility.

We invite you to join the ranks of the over 100k researchers using Preprints.org and share your research.

For more information, please visit Preprints.org.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative—the MDPI Special Issue Mentor Program.

This program will enable early career researchers (who must hold a Ph.D. in a related field) to experience editing a Special Issue in MDPI journals, under the mentorship of our experienced Editorial Board Members or other experienced scientists. The mentor program will provide an excellent opportunity for early career scientists to gain editorial experience, and to cultivate their ability to edit scientific research.

The mentee’s responsibilities include:

• Proposing a Special Issue title and assisting the mentor in preparing a summary (around 200–400 words) and 3–10 keywords describing the background, importance, and goal of the Issue;
• Writing a brief promotion plan for the Special Issue;
• Preparing a list of scholars who may be interested in the Issue and personally e-mailing invitations on behalf of Guest Editors;
• Writing an editorial for the online Special Issue together with the mentor.

The mentor’s responsibilities include:

• Conducting a final check before the Special Issue is published online;
• Performing editorial control of the Special Issue and quality control of the publications, both of which must be carried out in a timely manner;
• Providing suggestions to younger scholars if they have any doubts or concerns regarding submissions;
• Organizing video calls with young scholars and the Editorial Office regularly to discuss problems and improvement suggestions for the Special Issue;
• Making and submitting decisions regarding submissions with the assistance of mentees.

Certificates and awards:
After the Special Issue closes, the Editorial Office will provide official certificates for all the mentors and early career researchers.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your Special Issue proposal to the Editorial Office of a journal you choose, and we will discuss the process (i.e., mentor collaboration, Special Issue topic feasibility analysis, etc.) in further detail. The full list of MDPI journals is as follows: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals.

In addition to the new Special Issue Mentor Program, we will continue to welcome all Special Issue proposals focusing on hot research topics.

MDPI has just become the first open access (OA) publisher to reach the milestone of one million articles published. That is one million articles freely available to all, to circulate and build upon! We are proud to share this special moment with the global scientific community.

This landmark has been reached thanks to the immeasurable support of more than 600,000 expert reviewers, 66,000 editorial board members and 6700 hard-working colleagues across MDPI’s global offices.

Within more than 25 years of publishing, our journals received 2.1 million manuscripts and generated 4.6 million peer review reports to get to one million papers published.

Reaching the milestone of one million articles published reinforces our mission to remove any existing barriers and to make scientific research accessible to all. Since its inception, MDPI’s goal has been to create reliable processes to make science open. This is a path towards facilitating the dissemination of novel insights in scientific communities.

Regular feedback from authors and reviewers shows that our service is greatly appreciated and needed. At the same time, the feedback helps us identify areas for further improvement.

As it stands, a significant share of published research findings remain closed access. More than half of the content published with the most well-known legacy publishers stays behind a paywall, and that is not including articles published in hybrid OA journals, or made available months or years after publication.

A new policy announced by the US administration in August 2022 requires that, as of January 2026, all US federally funded research be made freely and immediately available after publication. While the new policy does not mandate articles be published under an open access license, it is aligned with the open access movement in removing all barriers to research. Similarly, some of the most advanced research institutions in the world intend to have all funded research articles published in open access by 2025.

MDPI is proud to be the leading agent of the transition to open access.

"Thanks a Million" to all the contributors!

We are pleased to announce that the website of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation has been revamped! For the past couple of months, our UX UI team and front-end developers have been working hard to launch the website in time for the opening of the Sustainability Awards nominations.

The website is not the only thing that has had a remodeling. Indeed, the format of the Emerging Sustainability Leader Award (ESLA) has been updated. ESLA is now a competition open to individual researchers or start-ups founded by researchers under the age of 35. Nominee applications will go through 2 rounds of selection until the final 3 are decided. The finalists will then be invited to give pitch presentations during the Award Ceremony to win either first place (10,000 USD) or runner-up (2 x 5000 USD).

The World Sustainability Award, on the other hand, remains the same: a total prize money of 100,000 USD is up for grabs by senior individual researchers or groups of researchers from the international research community.

Nominations for both the World Sustainability Award and the Emerging Sustainability Leader award are now open! Check out our new website for more information on how to nominate.

Conference: The 88th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Mycotoxicology
Date: 6 January 2023
Venue: Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

MDPI will be attending the 88th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Mycotoxicology as the exhibitor. This meeting will take place on 6 January 2023 in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.

The 88th annual meeting is organized by the Japanese Society of Mycotoxicology (http://www.jsmyco.org). In addition to general lectures and poster presentations, there will be special lectures, symposiums, and luncheon seminars.

Special lecture: “Use of useful brewing bacteria such as aspergillus”
Symposium: “Challenge the elucidation of biological interactions”

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Toxins;
• Vaccines;
• JoF;
• JoX;
• Foods.

If you are planning to attend this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions you may have. For more information about the conference and booth, please visit the following website: https://www.jsmyco.org/conference/top.html.

A range of MDPI journals will be attending the 15th Annual Meeting of Chinese Society for Immunology. This meeting will be held in Chongqing, China, from 27 to 30 December 2022.

The conference focuses on the following areas:

• Recognition and regulation of innate immune responses;
• Adaptive immune response;
• Immune metabolism and immune regulation;
• Immunity to COVID-19 infection;
• Tumor immunity and tumor immunotherapy;
• Autoimmune diseases and other topics.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• IJMS (leading journal);
• Vaccines;
• Metabolites;
• Cells;
• Cancers;
• Biomedicines;
• CIMB;
• Pathogens;
• Immuno.

If you plan on attending this conference, feel free to stop by our booth #B13. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have.

For more information about the conference, please see the following link: https://csimeeting2022.sciconf.cn/cn/web/index/13562.  

Peer Review Week began 19 September 2022 under the theme of “Research Integrity: Creating and Supporting Trust in Research”. Through various blog articles, podcast, and webinar, we discussed this crucial subject throughout the week, celebrating the essential role peer review plays in maintaining research quality.

To begin, we held a Webinar on the topic. Professor Peter W. Choate and Dr. Emmanuel Obeng-Gyasi joined Dr. Ioana Craciun, one of MDPI’s scientific officers, for an in-depth discussion.

We invite you to view the event recording:

During the week, the MDPI Blog in a series articles highlighted how good Peer Review safeguards research integrity. The following topics were covered:

• Peer Review Week 2022
• Research Integrity
• What We’ve Learned About Peer Review Reports
• 4 Steps to the Perfect Peer Review Report
• How to Write the Perfect Peer Review Report: An Interview
• Inviting Great Peer Reviewers

In a new edition of Insight Faster, an MDPI podcast, we were delighted to talk to the co-chairs of the Peer Review Week committee, Jayashree Rajagopalan (Senior Manager of Global Community Engagement for CACTUS) and Danielle Padula (Head of Marketing and Community Development at Scholastica) to get their take on this year’s event and its related topics.

You can find the Podcast here.

We hope you enjoy the contents!

The winning article:
“Recent Progress on the Versatility of Virus-Like Particles”

by Ciying Qian, Xinlin Liu, Qin Xu, Zhiping Wang, Jie Chen, Tingting Li, Qingbing Zheng, Hai Yu, Ying Gu, Shaowei Li, and Ningshao Xia

Prof. Dr. Li Shaowei is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the College of Life Sciences/School of Public Health, Xiamen University, and head of the vaccine and structural biology group of the National Research Center for Infectious Disease Diagnostic Reagents and Vaccine Engineering Technology. He is mainly engaged in the research and development of genetically engineered vaccines and the application of structural vaccinology. He was selected as one of the “Young and Middle-aged Experts with Outstanding Contributions” in the National Ten Thousand Talents Project, “New Century Excellent Talents Support Program” of the Ministry of Education, and served as a member of the World Health Organization Vaccine Product Development Advisory Committee (WHO-PDVAC). As a core researcher, he has developed the world's only hepatitis E vaccine (launched in 2012), the first domestic HPV vaccine (launched in 2019, certified by WHO PQ in 2021, and licensed in Morocco and Nepal in 2022), a hepatitis E vaccine A series of diagnostic reagents, China's third and fourth generation AIDS diagnostic reagents, etc. He has won the second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, the second prize of the National Technology Invention Award, the China Patent Gold Award, the Qiushi Outstanding Scientific and Technological Achievement Group Award, the China Association for Science and Technology Qiushi Outstanding Youth Achievement Transformation Award, the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association-Sanofi Youth Biological Drug Award, etc. He has published more than 100 SCI papers in journals such as Cell, Host and Microbe, Nature Microbiology, and Nature Communication; obtained 29 invention patents, and was selected as the 2016 annual award winner in Nature Biotechnology. He is the first scholar from mainland China to be in the TOP 20 of Global Translational Research. 

The following is an interview with Prof. Dr. Li Shaowei and his team: 

1. What has been your main research focus in recent years? 

I mainly study the research and development of genetically engineered vaccines. Currently, I pay more attention to structural vaccinology, using structural methods to design new vaccines, as well as research vaccine adjuvants, corresponding preparations, etc. I also regularly go to the clinic. 

We have developed two relatively successful vaccines: one is the world's only hepatitis E vaccine (Yikening), which was launched in China in 2012, and was funded by the Norwegian government to carry out the first overseas vaccination in Bangladesh in 2019. We completed the Phase I clinical trial in the United States in 2021. This is the first Chinese vaccine to conduct clinical trials in the United States. It received marketing authorization from Pakistan in 2021. In 2022, MSF will apply our hepatitis E vaccine to South Sudan for mass vaccination in response to local hepatitis E outbreaks. Another vaccine, the first domestic HPV vaccine (Xinkening), was launched in 2019, certified by WHO PQ in 2021, and licensed in Morocco and Nepal in 2022. 

Our vaccine uses the E. coli prokaryotic expression system. Many vaccines are derived from eukaryotic expression systems. For example, the viral antigens that infect humans are proteins expressed by human cells, which are generally considered difficult to imitate with bacterial expression systems. We have achieved industrial production with bacterial methods, which are more efficient than eukaryotic cells, and have great advantages in terms of production cost, process and yield. Our first hepatitis E vaccine was made using Escherichia coli. Based on such an expression system structure, we further developed an HPV vaccine (bivalent). This HPV vaccine represents my country's scientific research strengths, making my country the third in the world to provide an HPV vaccine after the United States and the United Kingdom. 

2. How was your experience submitting to MDPI? 

Compared to other journals, I think MDPI is very fast in terms of processing and editor responsiveness. Additionally, in terms of our team's submission experience, the review comments received were also of very high quality. There are at least 2–3 reviewers each time, and the reviewers ask many high-level questions. I think the more questions the reviewers ask, the higher the quality of the article will be. It is worth mentioning that after the article is published, the journal will issue an electronic certificate to the author, which will give the author a sense of accomplishment. So the experience of contributing to MDPI is very good. 

Speed ​​is a big advantage because sometimes student submissions place a lot of emphasis on the publication cycle. Additionally, some time-sensitive articles, such as those related to the new crown, will hopefully be published as soon as possible. 

3. What do you think of the influence/reputation of Vaccines in China? 

From the perspective of our vaccinology, we do not actually pay much attention to which journal is good and which journal is bad. Except for CNS journals, which are recognized as good, everyone else chooses journals for submission based on their work content. You publish a lot of articles every year, and the citation rate is very high, so the influence is very large. The advantage of fast publication of OA is that the article can be quickly and easily read by scholars in the same field, which is equivalent to the faster and wider dissemination of the article, which further increases the number of citations of the article. Therefore, the vaccine circle still recognizes Vaccines. 

4. Your team's review won the Vaccines 2022 Best Paper Award. How do you and your team feel about that? 

Qian Ziying: I am very fortunate that the first article I wrote was recognized by the journal. I am also very grateful to Vaccines for the sense of ceremony and achievement from the publication of the paper to the selection of excellent papers. I hope we can create more scientific research stories and allow everyone to share them! 

Liu Xinlin: It is an honor for the article to win the award, and I am very grateful to Vaccines for the recognition and encouragement of our article. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary, I hope Vaccines will continue to develop and become better and better! 

5. On the 10th anniversary of Vaccines, what would you like to say about the journal? 

For researchers, academic journals are an important platform for academic exchanges. Therefore, I hope that Vaccines can serve as a platform for publishing articles in core fields, providing more opportunities for communication. After ten years of sharpening a sword, I also hope that Vaccines will show greater improvement in the next decade, presenting more high-quality articles to everyone, and that it will continue to attract scholars to gather, organize Special Issues or other opportunities, to promote academic or scientific development. I hope the journal will play a bigger and more important role in this field.

The 2021 citation metrics have been released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and we’re pleased to announce the following results for MDPI journals:

For more information on Impact Factors and what it means to index academic journals, please visit our related blog posts.

* Journals given their first Impact Factor in 2022

Source: 2021 Journal Impact Factors, Journal Citation Reports ^TM (Clarivate, 2022)