Editorial
Abstract
An excellent first year and more to come!
Firstly, we would like to thank all of our authors, referees and readers for the very warm reception which Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry (OBC) has received in this, our first exciting year. The excellent contributions by leading chemists from all the various areas of our discipline reflect the appreciation of OBC as a high quality, general organic chemistry journal. It is also highly rewarding that many scientists active at the interface of organic chemistry with molecular biology and nanotechnology, have quickly recognised the new journal as a forum to disclose their fascinating discoveries. The very positive feedback such as “appealing journal”, “strongly improved quality”, “very efficient and speedy handling of my manuscript” and “excellent personal contact with authors” that we have received directly from authors, referees and readers in this first year has fuelled our enthusiasm and commitment to make OBC a leading journal. We have been delighted with the success of OBC so far and will be building on this in 2004 to bring you an even better standard and quality of service.
Something we are particularly proud of is our times to publication. Compared to competitor journals our publication times are second to none both for full papers and communications. These fast publication times go hand in hand with high standards. OBC is committed to publishing work of the highest quality and as a result our rejection rate is over 55%.
Our speed of publication is illustrated in Figs 1 and 2, which show the time in weeks, from receipt to publication both on the web and in print for full papers and communications in OBC and competitor journals. For first publication on the web, the most critical time, a full paper in OBC will be published 5 weeks faster than in Journal of Organic Chemistry and nearly 7 weeks faster than European Journal of Organic Chemistry.
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| Fig. 1 The average time in weeks from receipt date to publication date for full papers calculated over the same time period (issues 13 and 14 for Org. Biomol. Chem. and Eur. J. Org. Chem. and 14 and 15 for J. Org. Chem.). All data were obtained from printed issues of the journal using the information supplied by the respective publisher. | ||
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| Fig. 2 The average time in weeks from receipt date to publication date for communications calculated over the same time period (issues 7–14 for both Org. Biomol Chem. and Org. Lett.). All data were obtained from printed issues of the journal using the information supplied by the respective publisher. | ||
For communications, times to publication in OBC are even faster than for Organic Letters with publication on the web being greater than 20% faster.
What makes us so fast? At every stage from submission to publication, authors can expect to receive a first class, efficient service. We have a single electronic system for the handling of all submissions on the web (see www.rsc.org/submissions), web based refereeing, on-screen editing (in some cases allowing us to publish corrected articles on the web on the day we receive corrections from the author!) and PDF proofs. Combined with this process, authors are e-mailed automatically when their article is available on the web as an Advance Article and also when page numbers are known. These services are supported by dedicated Editorial and Production teams. Articles are published on the web as Advance Articles as soon as they are ready. The typical time from acceptance to publication on the web is just two weeks. It is also possible to register for our popular free e-mail alerting service (www.rsc.org/ej_alert) to receive notification when a new issue of any RSC journal of interest becomes available on-line.
OBC is a broad organic chemistry journal which brings together molecular design, synthesis, structure, function and reactivity in one journal. We publish fundamental work on synthetic, physical and biomolecular organic chemistry as well as all organic aspects of: chemical biology, medicinal chemistry, natural product chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, macromolecular chemistry, theoretical chemistry, and catalysis. Throughout the year we believe we have fulfilled this remit and offer a balanced coverage to our readers. This is illustrated in Fig. 3.
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| Fig. 3 The % of papers published in each subject area during the first 8 months of 2003. | ||
Impressive coverage in chemical biology led to the successful inclusion of OBC in MEDLINE. This means that OBC will be indexed from volume 1, issue 1. For those specifically interested in chemical biology all OBC papers in this subject area can also be found on the Chemical Biology Virtual Journal (www.rsc.org/chemicalbiology) where articles are free of charge for one month following publication. Also, from 2004 OBC will be included for sale in a new Bio package from the RSC, Package M, which includes the journals Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, Natural Product Reports, Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences and Lab on a Chip at an overall cost saving of 15%.
OBC has published a series of Emerging Areas and Perspectives throughout 2003 and this will continue in 2004. Indeed this issue contains the Emerging Area ‘A “Molecular Switchboard” – Covalent Modifications to Proteins and their Impact on Transcription’ by Linda Hsieh-Wilson and the Perspective ‘Ru complexes bearing bidentate carbenes: from innocent curiosity to uniquely effective catalysts for olefin metathesis’ by Amir Hoveyda. All Emerging Areas published in OBC can be found at www.rsc.org/OBC/EmergingAreas and all Perspectives at www.rsc.org/OBC/Perspectives.
This year will see a number of new developments from the RSC as a whole.
We are launching the RSC Journals Archive – putting more than 150 years of chemical research at your fingertips! Now available, this fully searchable archive provides access to over 200,000 articles in 1.2 million pages published from 1841 to 1996. A range of purchase options and delivery methods are available to suit your budget and technical requirements. See www.rsc.org/archive for all the details.
2004 also sees the launch of an exciting new RSC venture, Chemical Science, the first issue of which appears in this issue. Drawing together the news and research highlights from all RSC publications, it will provide a ‘snapshot’ of the latest developments across the chemical sciences. It will appear monthly as a free supplement in the front of OBC and other RSC publications, and will also be available online, at www.rsc.org/chemicalscience. In addition to this, OBC staff are always on the look out for really exciting papers submitted to OBC and send press releases to a range of journalists when these papers are published. A recent example was the paper ‘Molecular screening on a compact disc’ by James J. La Clair and Michael D. Burkart (Org. Biomol. Chem., 2003, 1, 3244–3249). This was then highlighted in Science, Chemical & Engineering News, Scientific American and Chemistry in Britain amongst others.
Our first year has seen some excellent OBC journal covers which have aided in highlighting the high quality of research from our authors. These have spanned the subject coverage from enzyme inhibition in issue 1, combinatorial synthesis in issue 6, molecular screening on a CD in issue 18 and fluorescence emission in issue 22 as illustrated in Fig. 4. All our covers appear in our cover gallery available on the OBC webpage www.rsc.org/OBC.
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| Fig. 4 OBC front covers from issues 1, 6, 18 and 22. | ||
Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to everyone who has supported OBC by contributing excellent papers and providing valuable and speedy referees' reports. The reputation of the journal and, ultimately its success or failure, is dependent on the work submitted by supportive authors and the reports provided by dedicated referees.
As always, Editorial Board members and staff welcome suggestions as to how the journal might be improved or enhanced further. We wish you all every success in 2004.
Professor Ben Feringa, Chair Editorial Board.
Dr Caroline Potter, Managing Editor.
| This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2004 |