Editorial

It is with great pleasure that we announce the appointment of Jerry Atwood to the position of Co-Editor-in-Chief of NJC. Jerry Atwood has been a member of the International Advisory Editorial Board for three years and has been a great supporter of the journal. We are extremely pleased that he has agreed to take on the appointment of Co-Editor-in-Chief. Jerry will be working closely with Jean-Pierre Majoral, Jonathan Steed and George Gokel to ensure NJC’s continued growth and development.

We are also pleased to announce the appointment of Sarah Ruthven as the RSC Editor for NJC. Sarah joins the team from CABI Publishing, and we look forward to working together to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead of us.

In 2005 NJC sponsored the first two NJC Interface Poster Prizes, awarded to young scientists for work presented at international meetings. The first was awarded at the French Chemical Society’s Eurochem 2005 meeting to Ms Marie-Laurence Dumartin (a 1st year graduate student at the ENSCPB in Bordeaux, France) for her work on fluorescent acetylcholine probes. The second NJC Interface Poster Prize was given to Dr Peter Broekmann (a young professor at the University of Bonn) for his work on supramolecular architectures at interfaces presented at the ESF Research Conference on Supramolecular Chemistry. We congratulate both of the laureates and look forward to honouring other young chemists in 2006.

Plate1 Dr Denise Parent, NJC Editor (CNRS), with Marie-Laurence Dumartin, winner of the first NJC Interface Poster Prize.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2005 was awarded to Yves Chauvin, Robert Grubbs and Richard Schrock for their work in olefin metathesis. A Perspective, written by Professor Didier Astruc and published in the January 2005 issue of NJC, presaged this award by describing the historical development of the metathesis reaction. The impact of this article is shown by its citation on the Nobel Prize website (http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/2005/chemreading.html) as background reading on metathesis.

The publication of excellent Papers in NJC has further been demonstrated this past year by the 2004 impact factor, released by ISI® in June 2005. The 2004 NJC impact factor is 2.735, which continues the upward trend of previous years. Overall the journals published by the RSC showed an impressive average increase in impact factor of over 10%. Calculated annually, ISI® impact factors provide an indication of the quality of a journal—they reflect 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 on society-published work.

We are also pleased to announce that the average publication time from acceptance of an NJC article to the Paper being available electronically is less than 20 days, with the average total time from submission until electronic publication being less than 100 days. Our authors are getting their results out to the research community extremely quickly. These fast publication times could not be achieved without the help of our referees, and we would like to thank them for their continued rigorous reviewing of NJC manuscripts.

Throughout 2005 there have also been developments in the electronic version of NJC. RSC Publishing has invested significantly in technological developments across all of its products. First there was the introduction of the new website in the summer; it has a contemporary, fresh look and an enhanced structure for improved and intuitive navigation between relevant, associated content. 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.

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 the journal of their 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—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 CrossRef is presented, complete with DOI links. At a time when research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary in nature and the amount of published work continues to grow, it is hoped that the new technology, developed in conjunction with CrossRef, will significantly reduce the time researchers spend 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; improvements to the HTML functionality of all journals and to ReSourCe (the author and referee web interface) are already underway.

In addition to the above technological developments there are many developments planned for the content of NJC over the next year and more information about this will be given by the editors in a forthcoming Editorial.

We hope that over the coming year we will have the opportunity to meet many of you at conferences and meetings, and look forward to hearing your views on the journal.

Denise Parent

(Editor, CNRS)

Sarah Ruthven

(Editor, RSC)

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