RSC Advances – High impact, community led, innovative

It is just over five years since RSC Advances published its inaugural issue in August 2011.¹ In this Editorial, we highlight our achievements of the last five years, our core values and tell you about our aims for the future.

The development and growth of RSC Advances over such a short time has been greater than we expected and we are now the largest chemistry journal in the world. The journal has gained rapid acceptance within the global chemical sciences community and provided a home for work that falls outside of the scope of other Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journals, especially multidisciplinary work.

Last year, we received submissions from over 90 countries and over a third of our corresponding authors had not previously published with the Royal Society of Chemistry prior to 2015. This is a testament to the success of RSC Advances in reaching out and engaging with new communities.

Quality & impact

From the very beginning, RSC Advances has looked to publish only high quality research, which significantly advances the development and understanding of the field. We publish articles across all areas of the chemical sciences and particularly welcome multidisciplinary work. With over three million downloads of our content across globally last year, a current rejection rate of 60% and a 5 year impact factor of 3.485,² this demonstrates the quality of the work that we publish across all subject areas.

Approximately 90% of the articles we receive are direct submissions to the journal, a testament to how established the journal has become within the chemical sciences community. The remaining 10% of our submissions come to us as transfers from other RSC journals, part of our mission to provide excellent customer service to authors and facilitate the publication of high quality research.

Community

The community around RSC Advances is very important and increasing our direct engagement with the community is a key aim for us. Over the last year, we have brought on board a team of over 200 trusted experts to act as Associate Editors for the journal from over 30 countries. They work with a dedicated, specially selected, Reviewer Panel made up of specialists from across all fields of the chemical sciences, so our authors can have confidence that their manuscript is in the hands of experts at every stage of the peer review process. We believe in recognising the work of reviewers and the Reviewer Panel is our way of highlighting their important contribution to the journal.

Our Associate Editors provide us with excellent global representation reflecting our authors and our readership (Fig. 1). We are delighted to be working with these individuals and with their help, look forward to shaping RSC Advances in the years ahead.

Fig. 1 Our global representation through our Associate Editors.

Innovative

One of the primary goals of RSC Advances is to explore and introduce innovation to chemical sciences publishing, enhancing the experience for our authors and readers.

With our article-based publishing process, authors receive their page numbers as soon as the manuscript is accepted for publication and their articles immediately go into the latest ‘Issue in progress’. Our topic-modelling technology automatically categorises articles into one or more of the 12 main subject categories and over 100 further sub-categories, improving the discoverability of our content. Authors and readers can also sign-up for subject specific e-alerts to take you straight to the most relevant articles: http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/forms/V5profile.asp.

We also introduced Proof Central to the journal in October 2014 and the feedback we have received from authors has been very positive. The system gives our authors flexibility on how to supply their proof corrections and provides them with a faster, easier way to correct their article. We would like to thank all of our authors who provided feedback on the system and for their valuable suggestions on features to improve. We are actively working to complete developments to Proof Central based on your suggestions.

The future

We will continue to publish high quality science and ensure that RSC Advances is accessible to as broad an audience as possible.

We recently announced the exciting news that RSC Advances will be a gold open access (OA) journal from its first issue in January 2017. With this move, we not only want to give researchers free access to a broader scope of high-quality work, we also want to show that open access publishing can be both affordable to authors and sustainable for publishers. The article processing charge (APC) for RSC Advances will be £750, one of the lowest APCs in the industry and for the first two years, this will be discounted to £500, with further discounts and waiver options also available (http://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/about-journals/rsc-advances/). The new open access model will apply to all submissions from the 3^rd October 2016.

At the same time, we will be ceasing publication of ‘Accepted Manuscripts’ for RSC Advances. The accepted manuscript service has allowed an author's work to be accessible and citable as soon as possible. When the production process took several weeks, this provided authors with an opportunity to make their research visible to readers ahead of final publication of the edited and formatted PDF. Since the introduction of Proof Central to RSC Advances in October 2014, the average time from acceptance to publication in RSC Advances is typically less than 10 days (compared to 30 days in early 2014) and therefore we no longer feel the accepted manuscript service provides a significant benefit to our authors.

Further, from issue 1 2017 we will publish a single primary research article type following the same model as Chemical Science. As a new author looking for a home for your research, having to choose between different article types can make your job even harder; and extensive use of Supporting Information (ESI) has made the difference between ‘Communication’ and ‘Paper’ less relevant. Therefore, from the 3^rd October 2016 authors will simply have to pick ‘Paper’ when submitting their high quality primary research to RSC Advances. We will continue to publish Reviews and any author interested in submitting a review article to RSC Advances should contact the editorial office.

We are also expanding the Editorial Board of RSC Advances. Our panel of Associate Editors provides us with great representation globally and by topic area and we want to mirror that in our Editorial Board. We will be announcing our new Editorial Board members in the coming months.

We, the Editorial Board and staff at RSC Advances, see this as an exciting time for the journal, which shows RSC Advances taking a leading role in the publishing world. If you have any specific ideas that you would like to see the journal offer, we would love to hear from you. Please send your ideas to us at E-mail: advances-rsc@rsc.org.

We thank all of our authors, reviewers and readers for their support of the journal in the last 5 years and look forward to working with you over the next 5 years.

References

1. RSC Adv., 2011, 1, 13.
2. Thomson Reuters 2015 Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

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