New year, new resolutions, new impact for NJC…

This year, NJC enters its 34th year of publication. Since its founding, NJC has endeavoured to publish high quality work from across the full span of the chemical sciences, with particular emphasis on the contributions that chemistry makes to its sister disciplines, such as biology and materials science, to name just two. Confirming the generalist nature of NJC, we only publish work that will have a wide appeal to researchers.

2009 has been another great year for NJC; the Journal has gone from strength to strength, with a growing number of high-quality articles. NJC’s 2008 impact factor, released by Thomson ISI in June 2009, showed a significant increase of 11% to 2.94. We are confident that our continuing efforts to improve the quality of the Journal and increase its visibility will, with the support of our referees and authors, make this a continuing upward progression.

Themed issues

After a hiatus of several years, since 2007, themed issues have once again found their place in NJC. The themed issue on dendrimers, guest edited by Jean-Pierre Majoral and published in July 2007, strongly contributed to the increased impact factor in 2008. Some examples of the papers published in this issue are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 The most cited articles published in NJC’s themed issue on dendrimers in July 2007

Helical chirality in dendronized polyarylacetylenes, J. G. Rudick and V. Percec, New J. Chem., 2007, 31, 1083.

Catalysts based on palladium dendrimers, R. Andrés, E. de Jesús and J. C. Flores, New J. Chem., 2007, 31, 1161.

Recent progress and applications for metallodendrimers, S. H. Hwang, C. D. Shreiner, C. N. Moorefield and G. R. Newkome, New J. Chem., 2007, 31, 1192.

Dendritic vectors for gene transfection, M. Guillot-Nieckowski, S. Eisler and F. Diederich, New J. Chem., 2007, 31, 1111.

Liquid-crystalline fullerodendrimers, R. Deschenaux, B. Donnio and D. Guillon, New J. Chem., 2007, 31, 1064.

Dendrimers and magnetic resonance imaging, S. Langereis, A. Dirksen, T. M. Hackeng, M. H. P. van Genderen and E. W. Meijer, New J. Chem., 2007, 31,1152.

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Other NJC themed issues have been in the areas of bioinspired materials (NJC, 2008, issue 8, Guest Editor: Laurent Bonneviot), polymorphism and crystal forms (NJC, 2008, issue 10, Guest Editor: Fabrizia Grepioni), and photochromism and molecular materials (NJC, 2009, issue 6, Guest Editors: Kenji Matsuda, Keitaro Nakatani, Azzedine Bousseksou, Andreas Hauser and Jean-Paul Malrieu).

In addition, special issues dedicated to George Gokel (NJC, 2007, issue 5, Guest Editors: Jerry Atwood and Jonathan W. Steed), Jerry Atwood (NJC, 2008, issue 5, Guest Editor: Jonathan W. Steed) and Jean-Pierre Sauvage (NJC, 2009, issue 2, Guest Editor: Jean-François Nierengarten) have been well received by the chemistry community. The photograph shows Marie Cote, NJC Assistant Editor, with Jean-Pierre Sauvage at the IVth Joint International Symposium on Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry last year, where the NJC issue dedicated to Jean-Pierre was presented to him. We would like to thank all of our guest editors, authors and referees for their hard work, dedication and support of the Journal.

Plate1 Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Marie Cote at the IVth Joint International Symposium on Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry

2010 promises to be another successful year, with more themed issues planned; further details will appear on the NJC website in due course.

Editorial board members, sponsored lectures and poster awards

Professor Vivian W. W. Yam gave the NJC-sponsored plenary lecture at the 42nd IUPAC World Chemistry Conference in August 2009. She delivered a very well-received talk on ‘Molecular design and assembly strategies towards photofunctional materials’. This sponsored lecture provided NJC with the opportunity to thank Vivian for her input into the development of the Journal over the last 6 years, as sadly Vivian finished her term on the Editorial Board at the end of 2009. Professor Yasuhiro Aoyama also retired from the Editorial Board at the end of 2009, and we thank him for his contributions to the Journal.

To encourage the younger generation, NJC also awarded five Interface Poster Prizes in 2009 to young talented chemists. 2010 will see similar NJC Interface awards to inspire younger chemists.

Manuscript submission

Since May 2009, NJC has had a new online manuscript submission system. The new system offers a number of advantages to users, making the manuscript submission and editorial review processes more efficient.

RSC News

High impact publishing

Publication of the 2008 impact factors, calculated by ISI, once again brought good news for authors and readers of RSC journals. Nearly all RSC journals increased in impact factor, immediacy index and article influence, with an impressive average impact factor increase of 8.2%. Overall, the average impact factor for the RSC portfolio now stands at 4.7, equal to that of the ACS collection.

RSC journals feature in the top 10 rankings (by impact factor and immediacy index) in 6 of the 7 core chemistry categories listed on ISI, and of the top 100 chemistry journals ranked by impact factor, 15 are from RSC Publishing.

2009 also saw a 75% increase in the number of articles published in RSC journals compared to 2007 (…not only are our impact factors leading the way in the chemical sciences, but there are a wider variety of articles available for you to choose from).

New integrated content delivery platform

RSC Publishing is proud to announce the launch of our powerful new content delivery platform that supports multiple content types. Powered by the industry's leading MarkLogic Server, and benefiting from the interactive browsing functionality offered by the RSC’s enhanced HTML mark-up technology, the platform delivers exceptionally fast and precise results. Users can now search 165 years of world-class RSC-hosted content, including 20 000 book chapters, 300 000 journal articles and 450 000 database records from a single, simple search. Designed around readers’ preferences (identified from a detailed and ongoing user-interview process), our user-friendly platform offers faster browsing, intelligent searching, consistent user experience irrespective of content type sought, and simpler more intuitive navigation. We’ll be releasing even more exciting functionality later in the year. Please tell us what you think at mailto:rscpublishing@rsc.org.

ChemSpider

Last year, the RSC acquired ChemSpider, the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information freely available online, with fast searching of over 21.5 million chemical structures. Alongside the powerful database, the ChemSpider development team brings well over 40 years of additional cheminformatics experience to the RSC, including a chemistry-centric document markup system capable of finding chemical names, converting them to chemical structures and linking to online resources. Integration of this technology with RSC’s existing award winning enhanced HTML mark-up technology, RSC Prospect, will lead to substantial enhancements in semantic enrichment for the chemical sciences. Find out more at www.chemspider.com.

Continued e-alert success in 2010

2009 saw the launch of the new RSC journal e-alerts; in 2010 we are hoping to see a continued rise in their popularity. The e-alerts are packed with information and links, enabling readers to easily view content as soon as it’s published, helping them to stay abreast of journal content. The new e-alert registration system has been designed so that readers can manage their own subscriptions, tailoring the information they receive and giving them the freedom to unsubscribe at any point. You can find out more information online: www.rsc.org/alerts.

New for 2010: The RSC eBook subject collections

In response to readers’ needs and testament to the innovation of RSC Publishing, we are pleased to announce the launch of new RSC eBook Subject Collections.

The nine new RSC eBook Subject Collections, including a Tutorial Chemistry Texts and Paperbacks package, deliver the high quality content contained in our books into subject specialist packages. With new content being uploaded throughout the year, the new RSC eBook Subject Collections are set to become another key, premier resource. To find out more, please visit www.rsc.org/ebooks.

Symposia series

The RSC is pleased to announce a significant new global symposia series—the International Symposia on Advancing the Chemical Sciences (ISACS) meetings will be held on three continents, over three sequential weeks, focusing on distinct subject areas. More information can be found at: www.rsc.org/isacs.

Denise Parent

(Editor, CNRS)

Sarah Ruthven

(Editor, RSC)

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