Happy New Year from Green Chemistry
Abstract
Welcome to the New Year and issue 1 2006 of Green Chemistry. In this Editorial I reflect on the past year and look to the future and the exciting developments in RSC Publishing.
Rapid technological advances at the Royal Society of Chemistry
2005 has seen RSC Publishing invest significantly in technological developments across all of its products. First there was the introduction of the new website in the summer which included a contemporary, fresh look and an enhanced structure for improved and intuitive navigation between relevant, associated content (Fig. 1). The improvements to the technological infrastructure have made the site more flexible and efficient, and better equip the RSC to deliver enhanced publishing products and services for its customers in the future. The new look was just the start and towards the end of the year we were pleased to provide further enhancements in the form of RSS feeds and ‘forward linking’ facilities, increasing the functionality of the electronic journal. Each of these developments is explained briefly below, to show how they can help your research. | ||
| Fig. 1 The new Green Chemistry website. | ||
RSS, or ‘really simple syndication’, is the latest way to keep up with the research published by the RSC. The new service provides subscribers with alerts as soon as an Advance Article is published in their journal of choice. Journal readers simply need to go to the journal homepage, click on the RSS link, and follow the step-by-step instructions to register for these enhanced alerts. RSS feeds include both the graphical abstract and text from a journal's contents page—i.e. they deliver access to new research straight to a reader’s PC, as soon as it is published. Many feed reader software packages also have the added benefit of remembering what has been read previously, which in turn makes tracking and managing journal browsing more efficient.
‘Forward linking’, the reverse of reference linking, enables readers to link from any RSC published paper to the articles in which it is cited. In essence, it allows researchers to easily track the progression of a concept or discovery, since its original publication. With one click of a button (on the ‘search for citing articles’ link) a list of citing articles included in Cross-Ref is presented, complete with DOI links. At a time when research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary in nature and the amount of published works continues to grow, it is hoped that the new technology, developed in conjunction with Cross-Ref, will significantly reduce the time spent by researchers searching for information.
These developments demonstrate the investment in publishing products and services over the past year and 2006 will see us enhancing our products further, with improvements to the HTML functionality of all journals and ReSourCe (the author and referee web interface) already underway.
The 2004 impact factors, released by ISI® in June 2005, showed an impressive average increase of over 10% for RSC journals (Fig. 2). The impact factor for Green Chemistry increased significantly from 2.8 to 3.5—an increase of 25%, reflecting the wider acceptability of the subject material and providing justification for our recent efforts to improve the quality of published material. We would like to thank our referees for their help in achieving this impact factor through their continued rigorous reviewing of Green Chemistry manuscripts. Calculated annually, ISI® impact factors provide an indication of the quality of a journal—they take into account the number of citations in a given year for all the citeable documents published within a journal in the preceding two years. It is worth noting that alongside the ACS publications, journals from RSC Publishing have the highest median impact factor among publishers in the chemical sciences. This encouraging statistic demonstrates the recognition and status that researchers place in society published work.
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| Fig. 2 Median impact factor in seven ISI core chemistry categories. | ||
Chemical biology content published in this journal is highlighted in the Chemical Biology Virtual Journal. The portal, which was launched in 2002 in recognition of the significant amount of chemical biology material published across RSC journals, enables interested readers to readily access relevant items. All chemical biology articles and related papers published in RSC journals are drawn together online every two weeks, with a selection of the primary literature free to access for a month.
As well as an impressive portfolio of prestigious journals, the RSC has a significant collection of book titles. The first titles in three new series: RSC Biomolecular Sciences; RSC Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Series; and Issues in Toxicology were published in 2005, with further titles due during 2006. Future growth in the books publishing programme is planned, which reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the chemical sciences.
Sarah Ruthven
Editor
| This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2006 |