Journal developments for 2004

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Abstract

Maurizio Prato and Graham McCann highlight the achievements of Journal of Materials Chemistry in 2003 and summarise the important changes for 2004, including the increased frequency of publication to 24 issues.

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Welcome to our first of 24 issues for 2004! Journal of Materials Chemistry was launched as six issues in 1991 and increased to 12 issues in 1992. On average submissions have risen by 13% each year since, so that the journal expects to receive over 1600 articles this year (see below) and the time is now right to move to 24 issues.

In addition to the journal appearing more frequently and articles appearing faster in print, the numbers of papers and pages published will also increase. The design of the print journal has been improved and we have taken this opportunity to include free colour contents entries to give authors the best possible opportunity to highlight their work to readers. We have increased the number of invited articles and launched three new types of article, two of which are featured in this issue.

  Applications are review articles focussing on the applications and properties of materials. Our first Application is published in this issue. Dr Bill MacDonald from DuPont Teijin Films describes the engineering of organic films for display technologies. In a forthcoming issue we will publish an Application from Professor William Milne from The Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge which will cover the application of carbon nanotubes as field emission sources.

  Highlights are reviews that are shorter than our popular Feature Articles. Highlights focus on important new developments made over the past year and also identify where further work is urgently required or where challenges are still faced. Our first Highlight describes the excellent work of Professor Alan Dalton and colleagues on continuous carbon nanotube composite fibers that can be woven into cloth.

A future issue will see the launch of Opinions. These are a forum where two researchers will represent opposing points of view and debate issues through a short correspondence. The spirit of the debate will be informative and written in an entertaining and lively manner. Professor William Rees will Chair our first Opinion and has invited Professors Andrew Barron and Paul O'Brien to discuss the molecular design of materials.

Major changes are also being made to the Editorial Board. The most major change is that Professor Peter Day has now retired as Scientific Advisory Editor. Under Peter's guidance the Board focussed strongly on increasing the quality of work accepted for publication and strengthened our policy of encouraging articles that demonstrate applications or properties of materials and discouraging articles that report primarily synthetic or structural studies. Professors Yasuhiko Shirota and Bernard Raveau have also retired from the Editorial Board as Associate Editors. We thank all these Board members for their enthusiasm in developing Journal of Materials Chemistry. A number of long-standing Advisory Board members are also retiring at this time: Professors Bruce Dunn (UCLA), Joel Miller (Utah), Peter Bruce (St Andrews), Atsuo Fukuda (Tokyo), Sven Lidin (Stockholm), Lauri Niinisto (Espoo), Maria Vallet-Regi (Madrid), David Vaughan (New Jersey), and Yoshiro Yamashita (Yokohama). Many thanks to all these members from the Advisory Board for promoting and representing the journal.

We welcome a new member of the Editorial Board, Dr Mathias Brust from Liverpool University, and a new member of the Advisory Board, Professor Luis Liz-Marzán. Both work in the area of Nanomaterials and we are delighted that they have joined the Boards. A profile of Mathias and Luis follows this Editorial.

Hand-in-hand with increasing the standard of work published, the rejection rate for the journal has increased. The journal now accepts the top 30% of Full Papers and top 25% of Communications submitted. The Editorial Board would like to take this opportunity to thank our referees for their support and to acknowledge the large impact that our referees have on the quality of work accepted for publication. The Board would also like to urge authors to be more discriminating in the work they submit: 70% of Full Papers and 75% of Communications do not get accepted for publication and the amount of effort this requires by both referees and editorial staff is large.

Upcoming highlights for later in the year include the publication of our 7th Materials Discussion Meeting: From Molecules to Materials — the influence of molecular precursors design on the preparation of functional materials. We will also publish two Guest Editor issues: “New Developments in Nanomaterials” edited by Professor Ram Rao and “New Developments in Bio-related Materials” edited by Dr Joanna Aizenberg and Professors Jacques Livage and Steven Mann.

This issue includes a copy of Chemical Science which will be featured monthly in a number of RSC journals including Journal of Materials Chemistry. Chemical Science will provide a snapshot of the latest developments across the chemical sciences and showcase a selection of the best work published in RSC journals, based on the advice of referees and hot articles identified by the journal's editorial staff (www.rsc.org/chemicalscience).

Fig. 1 Times from receipt to print publication are averages (median) for the period January–July 2003. Data are shown for Communications in Chemistry of Materials, Advanced Materials and Journal of Materials Chemistry.

RSC journals now operate a 100% electronic route for publication, from web submission and review, through on-screen editing, to PDF proofs and web publication. This is one of the reasons that our publication times are the fastest in the field (see above for a comparison of our Communications against Chemistry of Materials and Advanced Materials). We encourage you to use the web for sending your submissions as this is the fastest way to log your paper onto the RSC system (www.rsc.org/submissions).

One of the largest initiatives for this year is the launch of the RSC Journals Archive. This puts more than 150 years of chemical research on one fully searchable archive and provides access to over 200,000 articles in 1.2 million pages, published from 1841 to 1996. See www.rsc.org/archive for all the details.

Our invited Feature Articles, Highlights and Applications are listed at www.rsc.org/reviews to facilitate the reader in identifying those of interest.

To finish on electronic developments, we would like to thank the authors of our most accessed articles (see box). These are measured from web access statistics over the period January–October 2003.

 

Most accessed Communications
•	Geoffrey J. Ashwell, Richard Hamilton and L. R. Hermann High, Molecular rectification: asymmetric current–voltage curves from self-assembled monolayers of a donor–(π-bridge)–acceptor dye, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 1501–1503.
•	Allen W. Apblett, Satish I. Kuriyavar and B. P. Kiran, Preparation of micron-sized spherical porous iron oxide particles, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 983–985.
•	Yongde Xia and Robert Mokaya, Facile and high yield synthesis of mesostructured MCM-48 silica crystals, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 657–659.
•	Masanori Yamazaki, Makoto Teduka, Kazuko Ikeda and Shoji Ichihara, Preparation of carbon materials with coral-like continuous pores using miscible polymer blends, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 975–977.
•	Mark Green, Robin Taylor and Gareth Wakefield, The synthesis of luminescent adenosine triphosphate passivated cadmium sulfide nanoparticles, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 1859–1861.

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Most accessed Papers
•	Yiwei Tan, Xinhua Dai, Yongfang Li and Daoben Zhu, Preparation of gold, platinum, palladium and silver nanoparticles by the reduction of their salts with a weak reductant–potassium bitartrate, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 1069–1075.
•	Sajanikumari Sadasivan, Deepa Khushalani and Stephen Mann, Synthesis and shape modification of organo-functionalised silica nanoparticles with ordered mesostructured interiors, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 1023–1029.
•	Yutaka Harima, Xiaoqing Jiang, Yoshihito Kunugi, Kazuo Yamashita, Akinobu Naka, Kyung Koo Lee and Mitsuo Ishikawa, Influence of π-conjugation length on mobilities of charge carriers in conducting polymers, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 1298–1305.
•	Gautam Gundiah, Samrat Mukhopadhyay, Usha Govind Tumkurkar, A. Govindaraj, Uday Maitra and C. N. R. Rao, Hydrogel route to nanotubes of metal oxides and sulfates, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 2118–2122.
•	Jianbo Yin and Xiaopeng Zhao, Wormhole-like mesoporous Ce-doped TiO2: a new electrorheological material with high activity, J. Mater. Chem., 2003, 13, 689–695.

 

The article accesses are updated monthly on our web page so that readers can keep track of what are our most popular articles. In addition, our web page also features our Hot Articles, selected by referees and the Editorial Office. All of our hot articles are free to access from the Journal homepage.

We hope that you enjoy reading the journal more frequently this year and the other innovations that we have made for 2004. We welcome your feedback about the journal and suggestions for further improvements.

Plate1 Maurizio Prato, Chair Materials Editorial Board

Plate2 Graham McCann, Managing Editor

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