Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of JAAS in 2003.

Looking back on 2002, there were many firsts for JAAS and we would like to take this opportunity to share some of these with our readers. We started out the year with a month of record-level new manuscripts submitted to the journal—in March we received almost double our normal monthly level of new papers. In the summer, JAAS published a hugely successful Young Analytical Scientists issue featuring outstanding young scientists working in academia and industry, co-ordinated by Spiros Pergantis. By December, readers had accessed over 125000 articles in the web version of JAAS (the highest to date) and the latest impact factor data reported that JAAS is now receiving over 5199 citations a year (this is nearly 50% more citations than JAAS was receiving just 5 years ago).

The technical team at JAAS was also working industriously in the background to bring you new electronic developments and to continue to develop and improve existing “e-services”. Our electronic submission system launched in the summer of 2001 continued to be a hit with authors and by the end of 2002 almost half of new JAAS manuscripts were arriving by this route. In the autumn, we introduced a new web-refereeing system, designed with the ease of use by referees in mind. In particular, potential reviewers are now contacted in advance, to check their availability to undertake refereeing of a paper and are then directed to a secure server where the manuscript can be downloaded. This system is much improved over that which it replaces, and JAAS has already received complimentary comments from referees about the new system. Throughout the year we continued to send pdf proofs to authors and in November, after popular demand, we started to supply pdf files of printed papers to authors so that JAAS authors can make reprints on demand.

The much awaited reference linking was successfully implemented for RSC journals, including JAAS. With CrossRef as the linking backbone (see www.crossref.org), this new system allows dynamic linking between citations that appear in JAAS articles and the original source item. RSC journals launched this facility in September, ahead of journals published by other publishers such as ACS, IOPP and IEEE.

We also announce here the closure of the JAAS glow discharge section. Our original concept was to launch a “Glow-Discharge electronic-only journal” to provide a forum for rapid publication of enhanced communication-type articles on this developing area of spectrometry, which would benefit from the support of the infrastructure of JAAS (and its impact factor) and would eventually be made available to subscribers as a separate journal. Authors were somewhat reluctant to publish in a new journal. Additionally, the success of various RSC projects to improve publication times and develop electronic enhancements, like the availability of “Electronic Supplementary Information” and “Advance Articles”, meant that the RSC offered a similar rapid, enhanced service for a papers submitted to any RSC journal. For this reason it was necessary to rethink our strategy and we decided that, rather than launch an electronic journal, all papers on the topic of glow discharge spectrometry published in JAAS would be collected on a dedicated GD web site and all would also appear in a regular issue of JAAS. As such, the web-site served as a free, “virtual” journal of glow-discharge spectrometry. No new papers will be added in 2003 but we will continue the availability of the web site and its existing content throughout this year.

The Editorial Board would like to stress that, although the Glow Discharge section will cease, JAAS is still committed to publishing the best in glow discharge research and we are delighted to have an exciting special issue scheduled for publication in the spring, edited by three experts in the field, Norbert Jakubowski, Annemie Bogaerts and Volker Hoffman.

The Editorial Board is also working hard to bring you other new and exciting special collections of papers. During 2003 we plan to publish a special issue on the topical areas of metallomics (guest editors: Ryszard Lobinski, Luc Moens, Norbert Jakubowski and Ignacio Garcia Alonso) and a collision/reaction cell special issue (guest editors: David Koppenaal and Gregory Eiden) plus the European Winter Conference special issue.

All the above and we still managed to maintain our fantastic publication times (still 100–120 days on average from receipt to publication) and enviable citation rating (latest impact factor, 3.305)!

We look forward to receiving your excellent papers throughout the coming year. If there are comments you would like to make about JAAS or suggestions for improvement, please contact us; we would be very happy to discuss them.

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