Welcome to the first issue of RSC Advances

We are delighted to introduce you to the inaugural issue of RSC Advances, an international, peer-reviewed, online journal covering all of the chemical sciences, including specialist and interdisciplinary fields. We are launching RSC Advances in line with the Royal Society of Chemistry vision to be foremost in the world promoting and developing the chemical sciences. The aims of RSC Advances are to encourage new authors to publish with RSC Publishing and publish papers in new subject areas. The main criteria for publication in RSC Advances are that the work is well-conducted and adds to the development of the field.

With the launch of RSC Advances we are introducing innovative functionality offering you the choice of how you wish to navigate the Journal—through the traditional method of volume, issue and page numbers or through subject classifications. We have developed sophisticated, behind-the-scenes topic modelling, which classifies the RSC Advances content into one or more of twelve main subject areas in the chemical sciences. You will be able to navigate directly to content by subject area using the subjects tab on the platform or set up RSS feeds to be alerted when articles in these subject areas are published.

RSC Advances has an international Editorial Board of Associate Editors who handle papers in their areas of expertise through the peer-review process: James D. Batteas at Texas A&M University, USA (materials chemistry); Russell J. Cox at the University of Bristol, UK (organic and biological chemistry); Marcos N. Eberlin at the University of Campinas - UNICAMP, Brazil (analytical chemistry); Changming Li at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (environmental chemistry); T. N. Guru Row at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India (physical/inorganic chemistry); Suning Wang at Queen's University, Canada (inorganic/materials chemistry); and Urs Welz-Biermann (organic chemistry). Full profiles of the RSC Advances Associate Editors are available on the Journal website at www.rsc.org/advances. These Associate Editors together with a dedicated team of RSC Publishing Editors ensure that papers submitted to the Journal are handled fairly and rapidly through the peer-review and publication process. RSC Advances publishes reviews, communications and full papers with no page limits and no page charges. In addition, there are no restrictions on the use of colour in articles. Authors also have the opportunity for their articles to be open access through RSC Open Science.

This first issue of RSC Advances highlights what you can expect from the Journal—research from across the chemical sciences and from around the world. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the authors and referees for their support of RSC Advances at this early stage. Papers published in RSC Advances this year and in 2012 will be free to access, after a simple registration process, giving them maximum visibility. We would encourage you to sign up to the RSC Advances newsletter, Kaleidoscope. This regular newsletter and the RSC Advances blog will keep you up to date with all the latest news about the Journal. For details of how to register for free access to RSC Advances, sign up to the newsletter or view the blog visit the Journal website at: www.rsc.org/advances.

We hope you enjoy reading the papers in this first issue of RSC Advances and will consider submitting some of your future research to the Journal. Details of how to submit an article to RSC Advances are available on our website. We welcome any comments you have about the journal and invite you to contact us at E-mail: advances-rsc@rsc.org. We look forward to seeing your articles in RSC Advances.

Plate1 Mike Ward

Plate2 Sarah Ruthven

Mike Ward

Chair of the Editorial Board, Sheffield University, UK

Sarah Ruthven

Editor, RSC Publishing

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