Happy New Year from Polymer Chemistry

It's exciting times at Polymer Chemistry and in this Editorial we would like to share with you some of the highlights of 2013 as well as looking forward to 2014 which sees Polymer Chemistry enter its fifth volume of publication. Polymer Chemistry mirrors The Royal Society of Chemistry in existing to serve and to advance polymer chemistry across the world and we are particularly pleased to welcome all contributions in the scope of the journal and to serve the emerging as well as the established polymer chemistry communities. Publishing is going through rapid changes at present and we hope to keep up and give the community a valuable resource for many years ahead.

In 2013 we doubled the number of issues published from 12 to 24 and we would like to take this opportunity to thank the polymer chemistry community for their continuing support in choosing to send their work to us, and also our referees who have helped maintain our efficient peer-review process – it now takes on average fewer than 8 weeks from submission to publication of a Polymer Chemistry article.

These fast publication times are also due to our Associate Editors: Dave Haddleton (Editor-in-Chief, University of Warwick), Eva Harth (Vanderbilt University) and Brent Sumerlin (University of Florida) as well as new additions to the team in 2013: Ben Zhong Tang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Wenping Hu (Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Wei You (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Christopher Barner-Kowollik (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), who has changed his role from Editorial Board member to Associate Editor (Fig. 1). We also welcomed Masami Kamigaito (Nagoya University) and Heather Maynard (UCLA) to the Editorial Board and we look forward to working with them over the coming months and years. We also wish to thank our retiring Board members for their support of the journal.

Fig. 1 Our Associate Editors: (l–r) Dave Haddleton, Eva Harth, Brent Sumerlin, Ben Zhong Tang, Wenping Hu, Wei You and Christopher Barner-Kowollik.

Polymer Chemistry is now very much established in the community as the place to publish the very best polymer chemistry. We are very proud that the journal has an impact factor of 5.231 and an immediacy index of 1.305 – the highest immediacy index of all primary research journals in polymer science.

In 2013 themed issues were published on Self-healing polymers, guest edited by Howard Colquhoun (University of Reading) and Bert Klumperman (Stellenbosch University), and Conjugated polymers which was guest edited by Samson A. Jenekhe (University of Washington) and Daoben Zhu (Chinese Academy of Sciences) – we thank all guest editors for their help. In 2014 look out for our themed issues on Synthesis of polymeric nanomaterials for medicine, guest edited by Cyrille Boyer and Tom Davis (University of New South Wales) and Sustainable Polymers: replacing polymers derived from fossil fuels – a collaboration with Royal Society of Chemistry journal, Green Chemistry and guest edited by Steve Miller, University of Florida.

2013 has been a great year for Polymer Chemistry so to keep up to date with all our latest news as we go into 2014 check our blog (http://blogs.rsc.org/py/) or sign up to the blog's RSS feed (http://blogs.rsc.org/py/feed/). Here you can find out about the latest Hot articles, most accessed articles, Editorial Board news, themed issues and all other journal news. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@polymchem) in addition to signing up to receive our Polymer Chemistry newsletter (http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/forms/V5profile.asp).

Dave Haddleton, Editor-in-Chief

Liz Dunn, Managing Editor

Nicola Wise, Deputy Editor

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