Announcements

The Water Editorial Board and Editorial Team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy our reviewers have dedicated to assessing the manuscripts submitted to the journal. With their great support, high scientific quality and quick turnaround of the Water journal have been maintained.

Here, we are pleased to announce the winners of Outstanding Reviewer Awards 2020:

1. A certificate with 500 Swiss Francs (CHF) and one 50% discount on a Water paper in 2021

2. A certificate with one 50% discount on a Water paper in 2021

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)

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Water 2021 Young Investigator Award is Dr. Stefanos Giannakis.

Dr. Stefanos Giannakis is a Research Professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain. His research and outstanding scientific contribution in the field of water resources is specifically focused on water/wastewater treatment. Dr. Stefanos Giannakis’s research interests are (i) development of novel sustainable water treatment processes, (ii) the fundamentals governing microorganism disinfection, (iii) photochemistry and photobiology of natural waters, and (iv) urban and industrial wastewater treatment by advanced oxidation processes.

Dr. Stefanos Giannakis received his PhDs in 2014 (from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece, and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Catalonia, Spain) and has an outstanding publication record, comprising 71 publications in peer-reviewed international journals. Not only is he the No. 5 author in “Solar Disinfection” worldwide, but he is also the No. 4 author in the “Disinfection/Photocatalysis/Inactivation” topic, as seen in Scopus. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Stefanos Giannakis for his outstanding achievements.

As the awardee, Dr. Giannakis will receive 2000 CHF, an offer to publish a paper free of charge before 31 December 2021 in Water after peer review, and an engraved plaque.

We would like to thank all the nominees from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee Members for their evaluation of the abundant excellent nominations.

In January 2021, the Polish Limnological Society (PLS) became affiliated to Water. As part of this collaboration, all members of PLS enjoy a discount on the article processing charges (APC) when submitting articles to Water.

The Polish Limnological Society (PLS), founded in 2001, is a non-profit scientific society and educational organization in Poland that aims to disseminate information on all aspects related to lakes, including their physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and management. As of 2021, it has over 100 active members. It co-operates with other limnological societies in Europe and organizes international meetings and workshops. Additionally, the members of the PLS are organizing scientific expeditions to explore threatened lake ecosystems, such as the Aral Sea. The PLS publishes the Limnological Review, a Scopus-indexed journal. It is one of the signatories of the World Climate Statement on how anthropogenic climate change is affecting marine and freshwater ecosystems, with a plea to avoid their further degradation and to speed up mitigation.

PLS is a professional organization whose functions are highly relevant to the scope of Water. We look forward to collaborating with PLS and publishing state-of-the-art research from its members in this field.

We are pleased to announce that Water became a semimonthly publication on 1 January, 2021. A semimonthly publication allows papers to be indexed in Web of Science and other indexing databases on a semimonthly basis rather than every month, and they become searchable and are cited earlier. We also acknowledge the many valuable publications from our authors and the important contribution of our dedicated reviewers.

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.

The AGU Fall Meeting is the largest international Earth and space science meeting in the world. This year, for the first time, the conference is being held in virtual form.

AGU20 is scheduled from 1 to 17 December 2020 to accommodate over a thousand hours of virtual content and minimize conflicts while maximizing global engagement. The scientific program content will be available on demand, with pre-recorded oral presentations and virtual posters available for attendees to view and peruse outside of the scheduled live Q&A sessions during the meeting. Click here for a program overview and more AGU20 details.

Water (ISSN 2073-4441), MDPI’s open access journal on water science and technology, has published more than 10,000 papers since its inception in 2009. On behalf of the editorial team, we would like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief of Water, Dr. Jean-Luc Probst,  the Editorial Board members, as well as to Guest Editors of Special Issues and Topics Board members who have ensured the continued success of the journal through their hard work and diligence.

Water is covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science), Scopus, Ei Compendex and PubMed, with a 2019 Impact Factor of 2.544, which corresponds to rank 31/94 (Q2) in the JCR category “Water Resources”. The journal’s Citescore is 3.0, which equals rank 82/217 (Q2) in ‘Water Science and Technology’, rank 88/219 (Q2) in ‘Aquatic Science’ and rank 147/679 (Q1) in ‘Geography, Planning and Development’ according to Scopus data.