Announcements

You are cordially invited to participate in the 2nd International Electronic Conference on Healthcare (IECH2022), which will be held from 17 February to 3 March 2022. This online event will bring researchers from all over the world together with no concerns of travel or other related expenditures.

Healthcare is the maintenance or improvement of health. An efficient healthcare system can contribute to a significant part of a country’s economy, development, and industrialization. This conference will provide leading scientists working in the healthcare field with an online platform to share their latest research and engage in exciting discussions. The main topics and sessions of the conference are:

• Artificial Intelligence
• COVID-19 Update
• Regenerative Medicine
• Sport Performance
• Student Session

The conference will be completely free of charge to attend, as well as for scholars to upload and present their latest work on the conference platform.

The accepted proceedings papers from the conference will most likely be published in a dedicated issue of the MDPI journal Medical Sciences Forum. Please note that before publication, Proceedings Series Journals will review accepted papers using the powerful text comparison tool iThenticate. This procedure aims to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism. Articles with a high repetition rate and lack of novelty will not be published in the conference proceedings. In addition, all participants will be encouraged to submit an extended full manuscript to one dedicated Special Issue in Healthcare with a 20% discount on the article processing charge (APC).

Important Dates:
• Abstract Submission Deadline: 3 December 2021
• Notification of Acceptance: 14 January 2022
• Submission of Full Manuscript to Healthcare Deadline: 27 January 2022
• Conference Date: 17 February–3 March 2022

Healthcare is indexed in Scopus, SCIE (IF = 2.645), SSCI (Web of Science), PubMed, PMC, and many other databases. Please visit the following website for more information: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/healthcare.

Event Awards

In order to encourage high-quality work among young researchers, we are launching the IECH Best Student Award.

Terms and Conditions:

This award is for the IECH-2 online student competition. The prize will be 500 Swiss francs, and one winner will be selected.

Eligibility Requirements:

• The student themselves should be the corresponding author;
• A scanned copy or photograph of a valid student ID card must be submitted together with the extended abstract;
• Presentation materials must be submitted.

If you would like to join this competition, please submit your work to the Student Session.

For more information on IECH, please visit the conference website (https://sciforum.net/event/IECH2022) or contact us by email (iech-2@mdpi.com).

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

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting online meeting.

Conference Secretariat

This serves to announce to our valued authors based in Japan that value-added tax, or consumption tax will now be imposed on article processing fees and other service fees for all papers submitted, or resubmitted (assigned new paper IDs), effective from 15 August 2021. The change is in accordance with the Japanese "Act for Partial Revision of the Income Tax Act and Other Acts" (Act No. 9 of 2015), which includes a revision of consumption taxation on cross-border supplies of services such as digital content distribution.

For additional information from the National Tax Agency please see here ("Cross-border supplies of electronic services").

Contact: Setsuko Nishihara, MDPI Tokyo

Official Statement from Poznan University of Medical Sciences:

It was with great surprise that the Poznan University of Medical Sciences learned of the article questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations co-authored by Dr. Harald Walach, who used to collaborate with our University.

Although we highly value freedom of speech among academia, we also believe that it is of utmost importance for a scientific paper to be based on reliable research and sound methodology. In our opinion, the paper in question fails to meet this condition. That is why we wish to emphasize most strongly that the article does not express the views of our University.

The retracted manuscript „The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations – We Should Rethink the Policy” [1] (Vaccines, Publisher MDPI) is based on the wrong assumptions. A number of experts had serious concerns about the use of Lareb data [2]. Moreover, data extracted by the authors from the observational study by Dagan et al. [3] concern short-term mortality after the first dose, which is not at all representative of mortality prevention in the long term after the second dose. In our opinion, the study misleadingly used data to yield conclusions that are wrong and may lead to public harm.

Throughout the pandemic, the Poznan University of Medical Sciences has been actively promoting COVID-19 vaccinations. As early as January 2021 we provided all our staff members and students with an opportunity to become vaccinated in accordance with Polish regulations. Over 80% of the University’s community have already been vaccinated.

Our researchers have taken part in numerous scientific seminars and university classes to disseminate reliable and up-to-date knowledge on COVID-19 vaccines. At the same time, we have been promoting and supporting vaccination efforts through the media.

Once again, we would like to stress that it was with deep concern and regret that we received the publication of the article The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations – We Should Rethink the Policy. Vaccinations are the most important weapon in the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This is the message that the Poznan University of Medical Sciences wishes to spread.

Rafał Staszewski, PhD, MPH
General Director, Press Officer
Poznań University of Medical Sciences, Poland

Professor Jarosław Walkowiak, MD PhD
Head of the College of Health Sciences
Director of the Institute of Pediatrics
Head of Department of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Metabolic Diseases
Poznań University of Medical Sciences, Poland

Reference

1. 1. Walach, H.; Klement, R.J.; Aukema, W. The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy. Vaccines 2021, 9, 693.
2. 2. Meldingen van bijwerkingen bij coronavaccins. Available online: https://www.lareb.nl/coronameldingen
3. 3. Dagan, N.; Barda, N.; Kepten, E.; Miron, O.; Perchik, S.; Katz, M.A.; Hernán, M.A.; Lipsitch, M.; Reis, B.; Balicer, R.D. BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Mass Vaccination Setting. J. Med. 2021, 384, 1412–1423.

The 2020 citation metrics have been officially released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)!

We are pleased to announce that 85 MDPI journals are included, of which:

• 10 journals received their first impact factor
• 96% of journals increased their impact factor from 2019
• 32 journals (38%) ranked among the top 25% of journals, in at least one category

* Journals given their first Impact Factor in 2021

Source: 2020 Journal Impact Factors, Journal Citation Reports ® (Clarivate, 2021)

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)

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.