As the year comes to an end, it is time to review the progress of Sciforum and associated conferences throughout 2014.

A great year for conferences

We have held 6 electronic conferences totaling 363 published proceedings papers and participated by several thousands scholars in 2014. Highlights of the year were the 18^th edition of the International Electronic Conference on Synthetic Organic Chemistry (ECSOC), as well as the 4th edition of the World Sustainability Forum (WSF). Further, we have hold the first editions of several electronic, online conferences:

• 1st International e-Conference on Energies (ECE) in March 2014, chaired by Prof. Enrico Sciubba
• 1st International Electronic Conference on Materials (ECM) in June 2014, chaired by Prof. Maryam Tabrizian
• 1st International Electronic Conference on Sensors and Applications (ECSA) in June 2014, jointly chaired by Francesco Ciucci, Dirk Lehmhus, Stefano Mariani, Thomas B. Messervey, and Alberto Vallan
• 1st International Electronic Conference on Entropy and Its Applications (ECEA) in November 2014, chaired by Deniz Gencaga

For 2015, we will host the conference websites for two conferences organized by MDPI AG in Basel, Switzerland: the 4^th International Symposium on Sensor Sciences (I3S), chaired by Prof. Peter Seitz, will be hold in June 2015 at the University of Basel, and the 5^th World Sustainability Forum (WSF), chaired by Prof. Max Bergman, will be hold in September 2015 at the University of Basel.

The Sciforum platform

Additionally, we have passed an agreement with the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) to use the Sciforum platform to host the conference page, abstract submission and the conference registration procedures for the 8^th edition of their conference, and with the International Society for Information Studies (ISIS) to handle the registration and abstract submission procedures for their ISIS Summit 2015.

Besides supporting conference activities, we have made quite some progress towards positioning Sciforum as a platform for free and open scholarly exchange. For this, we have released numerous major features, such as the discussion groups, shared/collaborative bibliography management tools, tools to exchange and discuss papers amongst peers, or tools to publicly comment on any scholarly paper that has a DOI number. The focus for 2015 will be to get these tools out to the scholarly community. Further, quite a long list of features is currently still being worked on, or planned for later in 2015. Stay tuned in 2015!

Your Sciforum Team