Announcements

MDPI will be attending EGU in Vienna, Austria on 3–8 May 2020.

The EGU General Assembly 2020 will bring together geoscientists from all over the world to one meeting covering all disciplines of the Earth, planetary and space sciences. The EGU aims to provide a forum where scientists, especially early career researchers, can present their work and discuss their ideas with experts in all fields of geoscience.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• water
• Atmosphere
• Resources
• Climate
• Environments
• Geosciences
• Land
• Galaxies
• Data
• IJGI

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Jean-Luc PROBST has been appointed Editor-in-Chief for Water (ISSN 2073-4441). He joined Water in 2018 and has made a great contribution to our growth and development.

Jean-Luc PROBST is a senior scientist in Environmental Biogeochemistry at the French National Center for Scientific Research ( CNRS), CNRS Research Director (DR1). He received his PhD in 1983 at the University of Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier (France) and his Habilitation (Thèse d’état) in 1990 at the University of Strasbourg (France). In 2011–2015, he was the Director of the Laboratory of Functional Ecology and Environment (ECOLAB), a joint research laboratory CNRS- Paul Sabatier University (UPS)—Toulouse Institute of Technology (INPT). Since 2015, he has been the President of the CNRS-INSU/INEE Scientific Commission on "Continental Sufaces and Interfaces" (CS-SIC). He was also a professor for 4 years (2004–2007) at the INPT, and he has supervised 30 PhD and 60 Master Theses. Jean-Luc PROBST has published 440 papers, of which 130 in peer-reviewed journals, 80 book chapters, 190 proceedings of congress, and 40 scientific reports.

Website: http://www.ecolab.omp.eu/profils/PROBST_Jean-Luc
Interests: biogeochemitry; catchment hydrology; river transports; weathering; erosion; carbon cycle; major elements; nutrients; suspended matters; trace elements; rare earth elements; pesticides; stable isotopes; critical zone
Affiliation: ECOLAB, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), University of Toulouse, campus ENSAT, Auzeville Tolosane, France

Jean-Luc PROBST was in charge of many national (PIRAT-GBF and ONT-Garonne of INSU/CNRS) and international projects and programmes: European projects ESCOBA-Biosphere “Continental Erosion and Global Carbon Cycle”, PARAT “A study of transfer of particulate and dissolved phases southern South America to the SW Atlantic ocean”, LOICZ/IGBP “Land Ocean Interactions in Southern America”, and IGCP 459-IUGS/UNESCO “Carbon Cycle and Hydrology in the Paleo Terrestrial Environments”.

He has been and continues to be a member of many Scientific Committees: CNRS Zones Atelier ORME and ZAAG, European Project CONCERT’EAU, European Network EUROLAT, international programme CHANGES, and INQUA Commission “Terrestrial Processes, Deposits and History”. He was also the president of the INQUA Carbon Commission (2003–2007). He is now a scientific expert member of the French Alliance for the Environment (Expert group on Water Sciences) which joins together all the French universities and research organisms. He is also a member of the board of directors of the World Competitiveness Cluster on Water.

He was a member of the French National Committee for Scientific Research (sections 12 and 46) during the period 2000–2004. He was a member of the Scientific Council of the Toulouse Institute of Technology (INPT) (2007–2015), member of the Toulouse Doctorate School Council “Sciences de l’Univers, de l’Environnement et de l’Espace” (2007–2015), member of the INPT Strategic Orientation Committee (2011–2015), member of the Direction Council of the Toulouse National School of Agronomy (ENSAT), and member of the INPT Research Commission (2011-2015).

He is also a member of different Scientific Councils in French and foreign institutions (e.g., Polytechnic Institute LaSalle Beauvais,-France, Oceanographic Research Center (CRO) Abidjan—Ivory Coast).

Finally, he is an expert member of the French Agency for the Evaluation of Research and Teaching (AERES) and president of different AERES and HCERES evaluation committees.

We warmly welcome Jean-Luc PROBST in his role as Editor-in-Chief of Water and look forward to achieving further success under his lead.

MDPI will be attending the AAG annual meeting, to be held in Denver, USA, from 6–10 April 2020

The AAG 2020 is joined by fellow geographers, GIS specialists, environmental scientists, and other leaders for the latest in research and applications in geography, sustainability, and GIScience. The meeting will be held from Monday, April 6 - Friday, April 10, 2020, and will feature over 6,900 presentations, posters, workshops, and field trips by leading scholars, experts, and researchers.

The Annual Meeting of the AAG is quite possibly the largest geography conference in the world, with over 8,500 geographers converging from the U.S., Canada, and nearly 60 other countries in a typical year. With thousands of different papers and presentations scheduled throughout the conference, you’ll find no shortage of activities that reflect your specific interests within the field of geography.

The 2020 Annual Meeting will be held at the Hyatt Regency – Denver at Colorado Convention Center and the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Downtown Denver, Colorado. For more information, visit https://www2.aag.org/aagannualmeeting/.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information

Remote Sensing

Land

Sustainability

Sensors

Water

Urban Science

Climate

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #415). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit https://www2.aag.org/aagannualmeeting/.

It was with shock and sadness that, on 18 November 2019, the editorial team of the journal Water and the staff of MDPI received news of the death of our Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Arjen Y. Hoekstra.

Prof. Hoekstra was an outstanding contributor to his scientific community. He supported his community by leading the Editorial Board of the international scientific journal Water for almost four years.

Prof. Hoekstra invented the concept of the water footprint. He introduced ‘chain thinking’ into water management and pioneered the quantification of water use behind internationally traded goods, by which he demonstrated the relevance of a global perspective in the areas of water use and water scarcity. He led two Special Issues on water footprint over the years, in which 26 papers published:

Water Footprint Assessment

Progress in Water Footprint Assessment

Under his leadership, Water came into its own, developing into one of the most influential and largest journals in its field, with a continuous increase in impact factor and the number of published articles.

The Water editorial staff will remember him as a devoted, responsible, and engaged Editor-in-Chief. He was committed to innovation and never failed to find new ways to support eager young researchers. His death is a loss to the academic community as well as a personal loss to anyone who has come into contact with him.

We offer our condolences to his wife, children, family, friends, and colleagues.

Water Editorial Office

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of SciProfiles, its social network platform for researchers and scholars.

The purpose of SciProfiles is aligned with MDPI’s broad mission to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and to serve scholars and communities by providing opportunities for academic networking.

SciProfiles also ambitions to serve as a sustainable, transparent and community-driven research evaluation system aligned with the DORA principles (https://sfdora.org/). Through their scientific profiles, academics can highlight their contribution to research communities, and measure their impact on their field, beyond publication numbers and impact factors. SciProfiles is currently a beta version and will enrich to give researchers the possibility to highlight all of their contributions to science and their scientific communities as authors, reviewers, editors, conference organizers, conference panelists, conference keynote speakers, or even as lecturers or student mentors at their University.

The classic components of popular community social networks, including follower/following, classical metrics, endorsements and recommendations (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1690), comments (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397) are or will be very soon highlighted in SciProfiles as open science contributions.

To help increase the impact and visibility of articles and their authors to an appropriate audience, the platform offers a NewsFeed that includes recommendations of relevant content based on interests, publication history, saved searches or colleagues’ recommendations.

SciProfiles’ avatars are now being integrated on several MDPI platforms, meaning that you will directly access researchers’ profiles from any of the MDPI platforms:

MDPI's journal publishing website: www.mdpi.com
MDPI's conference hosting and management website: www.sciforum.net
MDPI's pre-print website : www.preprints.org
MDPI's knowledge sharing website : www.encyclopedia.pub
MDPI's books store: www.mdpi.com/books
MDPI's literature database : www.scilit.com

SciProfiles aims to serve scientific communities at large. It can be embedded into third-party websites and also welcomes integration of data from third-parties.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/2
Dr. Franck Vazquez: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/FranckVazquez
Dr. Martyn Rittman: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/martynrittman

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 MDPI Writing Prize. Entrants were asked to write on the theme "Judging research: How should research and researchers be evaluated and rewarded?" We received a large number of excellent essays from PhD students and postdocs, and the process of shortlisting and choosing winners was not an easy one. The winners demonstrated excellent writing skills alongside interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

As last year, we will begin the process of collating all entries into a book that will be available in open access format. Alongside promoting good writing skills, we see the prize as a way to promote the voices of early career researchers within broader debates and policy discussions.

Congratulations to all of the participants and especially the winners. The winners are:

1st Prize (500 CHF):
Albin Nilsson (National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland)
[Read here]

2nd Prize (250 CHF):
Qi Zhang (Shandong University, Jinan, China)
[Read here]
Igor Ogashawara (Indiana University, Indianapolis, US)
[Read here]

3rd Prize (100 CHF):
Margaret Sivapragasam (Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Perak, Malaysia)
[Read here]
Arvind Sharma (The University of Queensland, Gatton, Australia)
[Read here]
Jose Flores-Guerrero (University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands)
[Read here]

The MDPI Writing Prize is an annual award supported by MDPI Author Services, which provides services including language editing, reformatting, plagiarism checks, and image editing.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of a new functionality giving the possibility for researchers and scholars to endorse, and formally recommend articles to their colleagues.

MDPI was an early signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/read/) which calls for improvement in how quality and impact of scholarly research outputs are evaluated, especially in moving beyond journal-based citation metrics (journal Impact Factor, Scopus Citescore, etc.).

MDPI supports the establishment of article-level impact metrics, including citations, views, downloads, and Altmetric scores. These measures serve as an impact indicator for research articles on a case–by-case basis, assessing paper on its own merit. However, these metrics are also subjective and can give a biased picture of the article impact: they do not directly reflect the quality or the intrinsic scientific value of the article.

In our view, community engagement with publications based on community-driven metrics can help to overcome this limitation. We have therefore launched an option for scholars to endorse articles, indicating their own assessment of its content and making a recommendation to their community. This follows our implementation of the open source Hypothesis commenting tool, which has been available for all articles published by MDPI for over a year (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397). Both endorsement and commenting are available for all previously published and forthcoming MDPI articles.

In addition to potentially serving as a sustainable solution to article assessment, endorsements will help scientific communities to identify the most relevant articles, independently of the journal in which it was published.

The code for the endorsing functionality, which relies on DOIs and ORCIDs, will be made available on GitHub with an open source license.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, President and Founder
Dr. Franck Vazquez, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Martyn Rittman, Publishing Director

MDPI will be attending AGU Fall Meeting 2019 in San Francisco, USA, 9–13 December.

AGU Fall Meeting is the largest international Earth and space science meeting in the world. After two dynamic meetings in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., they return to the Moscone Centre in San Francisco.

This year’s meeting will prepare you for what’s ahead: rapid developments in our science, new approaches to observing our Earth and beyond, the introduction of new data streams, growing demand for accessible science, the expansion of convergent science, and more. AGU will celebrate the past and inspire the future by bringing together the people, the imagination, and the science that will ignite our next hundred years to make our planet safer, cleaner, and more sustainable.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Atmosphere
• Climate
• Geosciences
• Hydrology
• IJGI
• Resources
• Remote Sensing
• Water

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#1248). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.agu.org/Fall-Meeting.

MDPI will be attending the International Water Association conference on Small Water and Wastewater Systems 2019 in Perth, Western Australia, 1–5 December at Murdoch University.

SWWS is a parallel conference organized by IWA. The conference focuses on sharing ideas, presenting the latest research findings and discussing new possibilities in science and technology with local and global policy directions, engineers and managers.

Water is essential for all life forms. It is a fundamental resource necessary for socio-economic development and for ecological sustainability. Good quality water is becoming scarce due to population growth and associated residential and industrial development and pollution, particularly in towns and cities. It is timely that the sustainable management of water resources is widely discussed, noting that water can be recycled for an unlimited number of times after adequate treatment.

The conference will discuss and explore new and innovative methods of treatment, better understanding and assessment of resources and their supporting ecosystems, proper management for conservation and approaches to achieve the dual aim of economic development and ecological sustainability. The focus is on the necessary infrastructure to provide good quality water, in sufficient quantity, in the most sustainable manner.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Infrastructures
• Resources
• Processes
• Toxics
• Water

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#01). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.swws2019.com/.

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