MDPI Annual Report 2017

Authors

MDPI

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2-2018

Abstract

Contents: Message from the CEO ● MDPI at a Glance ● Key Figures ● 19 Journals Launched in 2017 ● Preprints.org in 2017 ● Scilit in 2017 ● Sciforum in 2017 ● Institutional Open Access Program in 2017 ● OA Initiatives in 2017 ● Top MDPI Books in 2017 ● Journal Development in 2017 ● Journals Tracked for Impact Factor in 2018 ● Electronic Conferences in 2017 ● Call for Expression of Interest ● Physical Conferences in 2017 ● About MDPI ● Corporate Social Responsibility at MDPI ● Upcoming Physical Conferences in 2018 ● Collaborations with Societies ● JAMS ● Stay Connected

The year 2017 has been extremely interesting and rewarding for open access publishing and for open science. Funders and policy-makers have demonstrated a strong commitment and support for open access publishing, and to immediate availability of research output. In 2017, MDPI has continued to focus on its primary purpose of making science openly and rapidly available. We took great care in fulfilling this mission, and constantly kept in mind our responsibility towards researchers and science, to disseminate the latest research findings without delay, facilitating new research projects to be initiated and new breakthroughs to be made. We published 35,950 peer-reviewed articles in our journals, 96 % of which are available in Web of Science. This marks a 52.5 % increase compared to 2016 and makes MDPI a leader among pure open access publishers. This has only been possible thanks to the trust that authors have placed in our journals, the dedication of our academic editors and reviewers, and the devotion of MDPI team members for every single manuscript. In 2017, we continued to demonstrate our commitment to serving research communities. We signed several initiatives, such as the Initiative for Open Citations ( I4OC ) and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment ( DORA ), and we joined the trial of Knowledge Unlatched for funding open access in the Humanities. We strengthened our program to reward and credit the important work done by reviewers by transferring reviewers' information to Publons and offered APC vouchers to reviewers for future publications in our journals. We also added a free job advertisement service on the website of each journal. We presented more than 100 awards for researchers, including The World Sustainability Award and The Emerging Sustainability Leader Award, and sponsored 2397 academic events. Our literature database, Scilit, expanded and now contains more than 100 million publication records, a number that increases every day, and we launched SciFeed for users to receive regular alerts about new articles in their field from any publisher. I believe that 2018 will be a crucial year for the future of open access. Libraries, policy-makers and funders are starting to work together to effect a permanent transition. At MDPI, we are looking forward to keeping up with these important developments.--Dr. Franck Vazquez, Chief Executive Officer