Editorial

Positive impact!

As Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry (OBC) enters its fourth year of publication, 2006 is shaping up to be a promising year. 2005 proved to be very successful for OBC. The quality, and international authorship and readership reflected in the journal's first impact factor of 2.2.

We would like to thank all of our authors, referees and readers for their support for OBC and we look forward to your continued support for years to come. Thanks are also due to the editorial and advisory editorial boards who have worked well alongside the editorial staff to promote OBC and to help attract some of the very best work to the journal.

Indeed these are exciting times for organic chemistry in all its forms. Organic chemistry has proved its worth with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005 being awarded to Yves Chauvin (Institut Français du Pétrole, France), Robert H. Grubbs (California Institute of Technology, US) and Richard R. Schrock (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US) for their work in the area of metathesis.¹

The 2004 impact factors, released by ISI^® in June 2005, showed an impressive average increase of over 10% for RSC journals. 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 citable documents published within a journal in the preceding two years. It is worth noting that together with ACS Publications, journals from RSC Publishing have the highest median impact factor among publishers in the chemical sciences (Fig. 1). This encouraging statistic demonstrates the recognition and status that researchers place in Society-published work.

Fig. 1 Median impact factor in the ISI^® core chemistry categories.

Fast publication

We continue to be proud of our times to publication on OBC. Since its launch, our times to publication have been consistently faster than our competitors. With the fastest times to publication in the field, OBC is the ideal place for researchers to publish their best work and get it read quickly by peers.

For Communications, average time to publication on the web is just 40 days. This time is 10 days faster than our closest competitor, Organic Letters. A full paper in OBC will be published in 68 days on average, over three weeks faster than in the Journal of Organic Chemistry and three months faster than the European Journal of Organic Chemistry.²

OBC also continues to fulfil its remit to bring a balanced coverage of all areas, within the journal scope, to our readers with the best work being publicised in the wider scientific press. A paper published in OBC detailing a new breed of organocatalyst used in asymmetric reactions was among the Chemical Abstracts Service top ten most requested articles in the first quarter of 2005. This work on new proline-based catalysts by Steven Ley (University of Cambridge, UK) reflects the increasing number of research groups that are working in this area.³

I hope that you will agree that this issue starts the New Year off well with a Perspective article by Teija Niittymäki and Harri Lönnberg⁴ on artificial ribonucleases and an Emerging Area article by Matthew Tredwell and Véronique Gouverneur,⁵ which discusses how synthetically versatile fluorinated building blocks can be prepared.

This issue also sees the introduction of a new easy-to-read format. The improved legibility will enable readers to browse the articles quickly and effortlessly, which is especially important as increasing numbers of readers access the journal electronically.

Technological advances

2005 has seen RSC Publishing invest significantly in technological developments across all of its products. The introduction of the new website in the summer brought 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 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.

RSS feeds

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. Access to the latest research is delivered straight to a reader's PC, as soon as it is published! Most ‘feed reader’ software also remembers what you have read, which makes tracking and managing journal browsing more efficient.

Forward linking

‘Forward linking’, the reverse of reference linking, enables readers to link from any RSC published paper to the articles in which it is cited. This allows researchers to track easily 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 number of published works continues to grow, it is hoped that this 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.

Soft Matter and Molecular BioSystems

Following successful launches last year, the two new RSC journals, Soft Matter and Molecular BioSystems, continue to thrive. Molecular BioSystems is devoted to publishing the best work in chemical biology with a particular focus on the interface between chemistry and the -omic sciences and systems biology, whilst Soft Matter provides a forum for the communication of generic science underpinning the properties and applications of soft matter. Both journals have already seen many top authors from prestigious organisations around the world submit articles and have been very well-received in the community.

In particular, Molecular BioSystems has attracted top-quality work⁶ which complements work in OBC and will be of interest to many of our readers. Subscribers to OBC in 2006 will continue to receive free (online) access to both these exciting new additions to the RSC portfolio.

Chemical biology

Chemical biology content published in this journal is highlighted in the Chemical Biology Virtual Journal.⁷ The portal, launched in 2002 in recognition of the significant amount of chemical biology material published across RSC journals, enables interested readers to access relevant articles readily. 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.

January 2006 sees the launch of another exciting new supplement from the RSC: Chemical Biology. A companion publication of Chemical Science and Chemical Technology, it draws together coverage from RSC publications and provides succinct accounts of the latest chemical biology research. It will appear monthly as a free print supplement in the front of this journal, and is also available free online.

Not just journals

As well as an impressive portfolio of 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.

We hope that you agree that OBC has made a great start in establishing itself as an essential read for all researchers in all areas of organic chemistry. We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue and the other issues to come in 2006. As always, we welcome any suggestions that you might have for development for OBC.

On behalf of the Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry editorial board and the Royal Society of Chemistry we wish all of our readers and authors a very happy and successful 2006.

Professor Ben Feringa, Chair Editorial Board

Dr Vikki Allen, Editor

References

1. http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/2005/index.html.
2. Times from receipt to electronic publication are the mean time in days for the period January–July 2005 unless otherwise stated. Data for: Communications: all Communications published in OBC (to end Q3 2005) and Eur. J. Org. Chem. (issues 1–12, 2005), Letters published in Org. Lett. [issues 1–15, 2005 (alternate Letters from alternate issues)], short Communications published in Tetrahedron Lett. [issues 1–25, 2005 (alternate Communications from alternate issues)]; Papers: Papers published in OBC and Eur. J. Org. Chem. (alternate Papers from issues 1–15, 2005), Papers published in J. Org. Chem. [issues 1–12, 2005 (alternate Papers from alternate issues)].
3. A. J. A. Cobb, D. M. Shaw, D. A. Longbottom, J. B. Gold and S. V. Ley, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2005, 3, 84.
4. T. Niittymäki and H. Lönnberg, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2006, 4, 15–25.
5. M. Tredwell and V. Gouverneur, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2006, 4, 26–32.
6. M. L. Tomlinson, R. A. Field and G. N. Wheeler, Mol. BioSyst., 2005, 1, 223; F. C. Mei and X. Cheng, Mol. BioSyst., 2005, 1, 325.
7. www.rsc.org/chembiolvj.

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