Editorial

New Year's Revelation – Impact Factor now 5.8!

On behalf of the Natural Product Reports Editorial Board and the Royal Society of Chemistry we wish all of our readers and authors a very happy and successful 2003.

The past year

2002 has been an eventful year for NPR, with both good news and bad. It was with great sadness that we heard of the death of John Faulkner in November 2002 – he will be greatly missed. John had been writing his annual review of marine natural products since NPR was launched in 1984 and in the past decade these have been by far the most highly cited NPR articles. Earlier in 2002 John decided that the time had come to pass on this responsibility, and we are very pleased to publish in this issue the first article from the new team of writers, John Blunt, Brent Copp, Murray Munro, Peter Northcote and Michèle Prinsep. Many thanks are due to these authors, headed by John Blunt, for meeting tight deadlines to ensure uninterrupted coverage (the article is in its traditional issue 1 spot) and to Marcel Jaspars for coordinating events. John Faulkner was as pleased as we are to see his valuable and substantial review being continued by such a dedicated team of writers. In recognition of his extraordinary contribution to the journal, John was awarded the RSC's Long Service Award. A full obituary by Raymond Andersen, a former coworker of John's, follows this editorial.

Earlier in the year we had lost another long-standing and valued author, Jeffrey Harborne, who had been writing for many years on the subjects of chemical ecology and anthocyanins. Jeffrey's obituary appeared in issue 6, 2002.

Editorial boards

2002 has seen considerable restructuring and expansion of the Editorial Board and International Advisory Editorial Board, enabling us to strengthen our coverage in key topic areas and to continue to develop our international profile.

A huge thank you has to go to Tom Simpson who this year stepped down as Chair of the Editorial Board, a post he had held since 1991. Tom has been involved in NPR from its inception in 1984 as a journal reporting the key areas of natural products chemistry and has overseen its development and expansion into chemical biology. His vision and leadership have been outstanding and he has let go of the reins with NPR in extremely good health as witnessed by the quality of its authors, its wide international circulation and its extraordinarily high impact factor (5.8), the second highest of the RSC portfolio and the third highest organic chemistry journal in the ISI rankings! These impressive indicators are a measure of Tom's success as Chairman over the last decade.

Richard Herbert, another founding Board Member also retired from the Editorial Board in 2002. Richard oversaw the alkaloid contributions to NPR, drawing in many leading authors as well as contributing articles regularly himself over these years. Both Tom and Richard received RSC Long Service Awards in 2002 in recognition of their contributions to NPR. John Vederas has also stepped back from primary activity on the Editorial Board due to increased commitments as President of the Canadian Chemistry Society. We wish him much success in this important role. John's energy and input has been hugely important in recruiting top authors and developing NPR's profile in North America over the last five years. In recognition of his contributions John was invited to give the first ‘NPR sponsored lecture’ at the IUPAC Symposium on BioOrganic Chemistry in Toronto in August 2002. Gerhard Höfle, our representative from mainland Europe also stepped down in early 2002. Tom, Richard, John and Gerhard will remain closely associated with NPR as Members of the International Advisory Editorial Board.

We have welcomed a number of new members to the Editorial Board. Marcel Jaspars (Aberdeen) will solicit further articles in the key area of marine natural products. It was recognised that NPR's coverage of carbohydrate chemistry could clearly develop further and Rob Field (East Anglia) has been recruited to provide strategy in that area. We also welcome Jürgen Rohr (Kentucky) who will continue to recruit North American authors and Wilhelm Boland (Jena) who has been recruited to strengthen further acquisition of articles from leading European scientists. So welcome to Marcel, Rob, Jürgen and Wilhelm, and thank you to the continuing members of the Board, Tim Bugg, Jim Hanson, Finian Leeper, John Mann and Chris Schofield for their ongoing commitment to the journal.

We, David O'Hagan and Clare Bostock-Smith, took over in 2002 as Chair and Managing Editor, respectively. Both of us, the Editorial Board, and the RSC Editorial and Production team, are committed to ensuring that NPR remains a high quality journal of natural products chemistry and chemical biology and a repository of timely high quality review articles to serve the international community. As always we would appreciate your input directly to the RSC or through any of the Board Members on ideas for new review commissions or suggestions on the development of NPR more generally.

International Advisory Editorial Board

A new International Advisory Editorial Board (IAEB) was formalised in 2002 and is envisaged to be much more “hands on” in terms of advising and assisting the Editorial Board than the previous International Advisory Board (IAB). Heinz Floss (Seattle) who has been associated with NPR for many years as a Member of the IAB and Jo Michael (Witwatersrand) who has been a regular author for many years will join Tom Simpson, Richard Herbert, John Vederas and Gerhard Höfle on the new IAEB. Asia is a hot bed of activity in natural products chemistry but we are acutely aware that authors from Asia have been under-represented in published articles in NPR. In order to develop an improved strategy for recruiting leading authors from Asia we are delighted that Michio Murata (Japan) and Ren Xiang Tan (China) have accepted invitations to join the new IAEB and we look forward to working closely with them over the next few years. As with the Editorial Board, IAEB members will willingly receive ideas for new review commissions or suggestions on the development of NPR.

We thank Steve Gould, Lewis Mander and Kenji Mori for their assistance and advice over the last five years as members of the previous International Advisory Board.

Style and development of NPR

The style of NPR continues to develop, both in the print journal and on the website. The introduction of colour and the profiling of authors by publishing photos and biographical sketches have been extremely successful in improving the readability of articles and developing an attractive overall image. The Production and Editorial teams are committed to working with authors to advise on colour content of articles and beginning this year an image from one of the articles will decorate the front cover of each issue. In this issue the front cover picture comes from Joe Noel's article on the Chalcone Synthase Superfamily.

Other features such as Hot off the Press are proving extremely popular and we are very grateful to the Glasgow team of Bob Hill and Marie Claire Parker for their continuous efforts in selecting key highlights and providing copy in good time for each issue. A highlight of last year was the completion of the Millenium Reviews collection which provides an overview and historical perspective on key topic areas. These are readily accessible from the NPR website www.rsc.org/npr

Natural product updates

The NPR Editorial Board is also responsible for the current awareness publication, Natural Product Updates. NPU continues to rise in popularity, offering the valuable and time-saving service of scanning over 100 primary journals for articles on natural products chemistry and summarising these as graphical abstracts. Print issues appear on a monthly basis, and the entire content of NPU from January 2000 is available as a text searchable database, NPU online: www.rsc.org/npuonline. We thank MOSS Publishing for producing the content of this publication.

Developments in RSC publishing

RSC publishing has also seen many changes and developments over the last year, many of which are of direct relevance to NPR readers. Of prime importance to NPR is the launch of the reference linking facility. This enables online readers to link through from the references to the cited articles, whether these are published by the RSC or by other publishers.

In May 2002, The RSC launched the Chemical Biology Virtual Journal. This brings together all chemical biology literature published by the RSC, both journal articles (primary and secondary) and book chapters, with NPR articles forming the core of the review material. All primary literature is free of charge for one month following publication, and fortnightly e-mail alerts are sent to ensure you don't miss anything! This facility makes it easier for chemical biologists to find the material of interest to them, and offers authors raised visibility for their work. To browse the Virtual Journal and sign up for e-alerts, go to www.rsc.org/chembiol

In mid-2002, both ChemComm and Chemical Society Reviews were accepted for indexing by MEDLINE, joining NPR and other RSC journals. The natural products and chemical biology content of ChemComm continues to rise, with many high quality feature articles and communications both published and forthcoming.

Of core interest to the natural products community is the launch of the new journal Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry in January 2003. OBC replaces Perkin 1 and 2 and aims to be the premier journal for the publication of work in all branches of organic and biomolecular chemistry, including natural products research and chemical biology. Many articles of interest to NPR readers have already been published in the first two issues, including papers from NPR EB and IAEB members. Issue 1 is freely available on the web, so visit the homepage at www.rsc.org/obc to find these articles and find out more about the journal and its high profile Editorial Board. As with all RSC journals publication times are extremely rapid, straight forward electronic submission routes are available, and Editorial staff are always willing to answer your queries.

In conclusion, we invite you to continue reading NPR, and to take advantage of the other products and services the RSC has to offer. Suggestions for NPR reviews and authors are always welcome, as are suggestions for the development of both NPR and NPU.

Thank you for your support – we wish you all the best for 2003.

David O'Hagan (Chair)

Clare Bostock-Smith (Managing Editor)

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