[GOAL] MDPI Now Gives Scholars the Possibility to Endorse and Recommend Articles

[Franck Vazquez]

Dear Colleagues,

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

-- 
Franck Vazquez, Ph.D
Chief Scientific Officer
Member of the OASPA Board of Directors
Member of the DOAJ Council
-- 
MDPI AG, St. Alban-Anlage 66, 4052 Basel, Switzerland
Tel. +41 61 683 77 34
http://www.mdpi.com
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https://sciprofiles.com/profile/66220
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7967-3798
https://www.linkedin.com/in/franck-vazquez-932a96a8/