We continually strive to ensure satisfaction with all the services we provide to authors and readers of our journals. In particular, the careful selection of external expert reviewers is of utmost importance. It is the reviewers’ critical scrutiny that enables authors to improve their scientific output and guarantees the high quality of published articles. We depend on feedback from the author and reviewer communities about their experience. Over the last two years we have collected opinions and ratings from authors and reviewers. Below is a summary of the results: Continue reading
Citation Tracking and (Some) Citation Metrics
We have introduced a few handy citation features for our publication platform at www.mdpi.com, and used this to calculate some basic citation metrics.
Challenges and Contests are Appealing!
Challenges (ISSN 2078-1547) is a unique open access journal that publishes ideas for research projects (research proposals), research plans, perspectives or ideas for solving grand challenges, descriptions of tested and untested prototypes and other similar material. Its content is typically not publishable in a research journal, but has wider scholarly or scientific relevance and therefore deserves to be publicized in a journal such as Challenges. Continue reading
Introducing Open Peer-Review to the Journal Life
We believe that research belongs to the academic community, and that the community should judge what should and should not be published. Typically, for a particular submitted manuscript this process is delegated to a small number of volunteer peer-reviewers. Continue reading
Conference Exhibitions and Sponsorships in 2014
MDPI journals and staff will be present and/or sponsor several academic events in 2014. Here is a current selection (we will update this list from time to time to include more).
If you are organizing a conference related to a topic covered by one of our journals, please suggest your event for our consideration at http://www.mdpi.com/events/add, or get in touch with Alexander Thiesen (thiesen@mdpi.com). Continue reading
Recent Updates to our Manuscript Submission and Publishing Systems
Here a short summary of a few recent changes to our submission and publishing systems. Continue reading
Kudos to our Peer-Reviewers and Journal Rejection Rates in 2013
Our journals received nearly 20’000 manuscript submissions in 2013, or about 75 submissions per business day. It is a logistical challenge to handle this number of incoming manuscripts, to screen them appropriately, expedite them to external peer-review and to communicate with authors to keep them informed and advise them on revisions. More than 100 in-house editors are employed by MDPI to handle the manuscripts through peer-review, to manage the correspondence with referees and authors, and to guide accepted manuscripts through copy-editing, English editing and production. However, the most valuable part of the work is done by external academic editors and referees that generously donate their time to ensure that our journals publish high quality work. Continue reading
