We are pleased to announce that the winners of 2019 Travel Award, sponsored by MDPI and Publications: Jiangen He and Olmo van den Akker.

Jiangen He is a PhD student in the Department of Information Science at Drexel University, USA. Jiangen’s research focuses on the development of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of how science advances, especially through machine learning, visual analytics, and predictive analysis. He is keen on bringing together theoretical and computational insights and inspirations to the research community of quantitative studies of science. Jiangen is the lead author in a paper submission to 17th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI 2019), entitled ‘The Citations of Papers with Conflicting Reviews and Confident Reviewers.’ This work should be of interest and potentially thought-provoking in the studies of scholarly communication and peer review.

Olmo van den Akker is a PhD student at the meta-research group at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He has been an active participant in the debate around Plan S, the plan of major European funding agencies to make all research funded by them openly accessible from 2021 onwards. Olmo is also a member of the Platform for Young Meta-Scientists, a group of early career researchers that wants to collaborate on improving science. He is working on several projects, such as studying researchers’ interpretations of statistical results and the efficacy of preregistration, and he is expected to present the preliminary results of this preregistration project at the Metascience Symposium 2019 at Stanford University.

It has certainly been a difficult decision, with such a collection of high-quality applications for the awards. We would like to thank all of the applicants for submitting such a range of diverse and fascinating research topics and congratulate the winners for their accomplishment.

Dr. Tony Ross-Hellauer
Editor-in-Chief
On behalf of the Award Committee