Happy New Year from the Journal of Environmental Monitoring

Celebrating a successful year

The coming of the New Year is a time to look to the future and reflect on the past. This is my first editorial in my new capacity as Chair of the Editorial Board of JEM, and I want to highlight the many accomplishments and innovative changes that have taken place over the last year. Mind you, I am not bragging on my behalf—these changes are due to the strong and capable leadership of my predecessor, Dr James Vincent, our growing and active editorial board, our dedicated editor Harp Minhas, and his efficient and professional staff within the RSC family. I am here to trumpet their successes. Some are small, some are large, some you may have noticed and some perhaps not—but together they have moved our journal forward and increased its impact on environmental sciences.

We as a board continue to support the direction of the journal towards being inclusive and broad in its coverage, and to not narrow the focus to one aspect of environmental chemistry. Our readership, authorship, and overall audience is a very diverse one, and thus we wish to continue providing the best science across the spectrum of topics related to environmental hazards, exposures, and effects. Approximately ten core areas have been identified as central to the JEM portfolio. We also are actively pursuing publications related to new and emerging fields within environmental chemistry, such as the environmental considerations of nanotechnology, advances in environmental forensics, and the interdisciplinary area of medical geology.

To provide the best guidance to JEM staff in meeting these goals, we are expanding our advisory board to include expertise in a number of key areas. We also welcomed three new editorial board members in 2006, Professors Sadik, Jones, and Centeno. Professor Omowumni Sadik is a Professor of Chemistry at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and her expertise is in the study of human exposure assessment, endocrine disrupters, and toxicity of naturally occurring chemical compounds using electrochemical and spectroscopic techniques. She is particularly interested in the impacts of nanomaterials. Dr Kevin Jones is a Professor at the University of Lancaster in the Department of Environmental Science, and brings to the board a range of expertise in the fate, transport and impacts of persistent anthropogenic chemicals in the atmosphere. Our most recent addition to the board is Dr Jose Centeno, Senior Scientist and Chief of Biophysical Toxicology at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC. Dr Centeno is a leading expert on the human health impacts of geologically derived materials such as trace elements, dusts, and metals.

JEM has also made some innovative and cutting-edge advancements on the publishing front. We are very proud to report that the publication time is now less than 100 days, one of the fastest in our field. Our average time from submission to publication is now just 72 days. Once accepted, papers take only an average of 13 days to be published on the web. Both of these are clear benchmarks of success of the efficiency measures instituted by editorial staff. Our impact factor is steadily improving, having increased by 15% for 2005, we hope the 2006 figures will show a further increase. These measures and others are consistent and on-track with the strategic goals put in place by the board over the last two years. The journal’s website is also undergoing improvements and innovations. Now, for those articles where colour is not essential, the RSC will allow free colour in the enhanced HTML version (only). Therefore, although the print and PDF will appear in black and white, the HTML version can contain colour, thus enhancing the web edition. Thanks to Dr Stephen Davey of the JEM staff, we have added additional web pages to feature the Perspectives columns, with the Water in Perspective page already active and plans for others on Nanotechnology in Perspective and Air in Perspective underway. Another exciting innovation is the ‘Prospect’ project that will deliver semantically-enriched content to our readers in HTML: by clicking on the compound, readers will be able to obtain further information about that compound, including a downloadable structure plus a list of relevant subject areas. The RSC is the first publisher to utilise the International Chemical Identifier for a project of this type and scope (this identifier, InChI, is a digital equivalent of the IUPAC name for any particular covalent compound in which structures are expressed in terms of five layers of information: connectivity, tautomeric, isotopic, stereochemical, and electronic). The technology will also be used to enhance RSS alerts so that future news feeds can include chemical structures and other enhanced information. RSC Publishing intends to evolve this project to match author and reader needs so tell us what you think: we welcome your feedback on this new functionality and will incorporate your ideas to develop the service further. Find out more at www.rsc.org/sciencecomealive. JEM will help pilot this project, so look for this in the near future.

To provide continuing support for our authors and the scientific community and in keeping with current publishing trends, the RSC is introducing a hybrid open access model called RSC Open Science. Authors publishing in RSC Journals now have the option of paying a fee in exchange for making their accepted communication, research paper or review article openly available to all via the web. The scheme is only made available to authors once their papers have been accepted for publication, following the normal rigorous peer-review procedures (RSC Open Science operates in parallel with the normal publication route, which remains free to authors). Authors who have published their work in RSC journals are also be able to retrospectively apply for their work to be included in the scheme. Further information can be found at: www.rsc.org/openscience.

A successful year is behind us, and a promising one is ahead. Thanks to everyone (particularly JEM referees) who made this year possible, and, on behalf of JEM, I offer a special thank you to our outgoing board members, Dr Brit Salbu and Dr Roy Harrison, for their valued years of service. We will continue to call on you for your expertise from time to time, so it is farewell and not goodbye.

I wish all our readers a healthy and happy New Year, and if our past year is any measure, the coming year for JEM will be a bright one indeed.

Deborah Swackhamer

Chair, Journal of Environmental Monitoring Editorial Board

New developments at the RSC

Technological innovation

2006 has seen RSC Publishing invest significantly in technological developments across all of its products. Introduced last year, RSS feeds, or ‘really simple syndication’, have proved extremely popular with our readers. Subscribers receive alerts as soon as an Advance Article is published in their journal of choice, providing both the graphical abstract and text from a journal’s contents page. You can subscribe viaJEM’s home page.

Subscribers to JEM will now link from journals’ contents lists straight through to the HTML view of selected articles, in just one quick step. Here you can download references to citation managers (such as EndNote, Ref Manager, ProCite and BibTex), sign up for RSS feeds, search for citing articles (otherwise known as ‘forward linking’), print the article with just one click and send the article to a friend or colleague.

These developments demonstrate the investment in publishing products and services over the past year and 2007 will see us enhancing our products further.

Impact factors and immediacy index

The 2005 impact factors, released by ISI® in June 2006, 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 citeable documents published within a journal in the preceding two years.

Work published in RSC journals is also amongst the most topical. The immediacy index measures how topical and urgent papers published in a journal are, by dividing the number of citations in a given year by the number of articles published in the journal that year. These impressive new figures reinforce the RSC’s reputation as the home of exciting new research.

Changes and developments to Chemical Science, Chemical Technology and Chemical Biology and news of Chemistry World

Showcasing hot science from RSC Journals in Chemical Science, Chemical Technology and Chemical Biology has proved very popular with readers and authors alike. In fact, the free supplements have become so successful that from January 2007, all issues will be eight pages (in print), contain new article types and come complete with a fresh new look for the front page. Supplementary material will also be available online.

Meanwhile Chemistry World, the RSC’s award-winning magazine, launched two new web features at the end of 2006. The Chemistry World Blog is an interactive forum for news, discussion and opinion, looking at the science hitting the headlines. The Chemistry World Podcast interviews high profile scientists about the latest and hottest topics in science, and is free to download at www.rsc.org/chemistryworld.

RSC prizes and awards

JEM was proud to support the environmental community by sponsoring student prizes at two conferences this year: Metal Ions in Biology & Medicine, held in Lisbon Portugal; and Environmental Forensics held in Durham, UK (Fig. 1). JEM intends to sponsor further prizes and awards in 2007.

Fig. 1 Dr Robert Morrison presents the JEM Best Poster Award to Dan Wayland and David Megson for their poster entitled, ‘Identifying the Source of Nutrient Contamination in a Lagoon System’.

These prizes are just some of many awarded by RSC Publishing in 2006, a year that has seen more than 20 high-profile researchers gain financial support to present their work at events throughout the world, in recognition of their research achievements. More than £15 000 (or $30 000) was granted to the recipients, in total, to cover travel expenses to sponsored lectureships in countries such as China, Japan, the US and the UK.

Nanoscience from RSC publishing

JEM hopes to publish a series of reviews dealing with Nanotechnology in the environment in 2007 and these will also be featured on our website.

But it is not just JEM that is publishing high-quality papers on the topic—due to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject other RSC journals and books also include related content. This wealth of nano material has now been brought together in one convenient webpage, which is regularly updated with the latest research and books from RSC Publishing. Visit: www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/nanoscience/.

Not just journals

As well as an impressive portfolio of prestigious journals, the RSC has a wide selection of products for anyone with an interest in the chemical sciences. Visit the shop at www.rsc.org/shop to browse over 400 book titles, subscribe to or purchase an individual article from JEM or any other RSC journal, join or renew RSC membership, or register to attend a conference or training event.

In addition, RSC Publishing is pleased to announce the launch of the RSC eBook Collection. RSC books are now available online and can be easily downloaded as either chapters or books. The collection is fully searchable and also integrated with RSC journal content. To search the collection or for further information, visit www.rsc.org/ebooks.

What our authors say

We are always happy to receive feedback from authors, especially if it helps us to further improve the publishing experience. Because we believe that RSC Publishing offers the best service of any scientific publisher, we have published a selection of the comments we have received from authors from around the globe—take a look at www.rsc.org/authorquotes. Thanks again to all our authors and reviewers—I wish you all a peaceful and prosperous 2007.

Harp Minhas

Editor

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