Editorial pubs.acs.org/acscatalysis
ACS Catalysis and the Advantage of ASAP Pagination
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cluster papers that are typically highly cited, like reviews and perspectives, at the beginning of the year. ACS Catalysis is committed to serving the chemical community and remains focused on balancing rapid publication and dissemination of results with ensuring careful and rigorous peer review (more on this below). With ASAP pagination, page numbers are assigned at the moment a paper is published on the web in copy-edited form, and it appears in an issue within the next several weeks. As such, there are no delays to the “final” publication, and issues vary in size with the flow of papers received and accepted. In 2015, the 12 issues of ACS Catalysis ranged in size from 52 papers to 98 papers. Similarly, the percentage of reviews, perspectives, and viewpoints in each issue ranged from 1.5% to 17.5% (average for the whole year was 7%).3 As noted last month,4 2015 was a great year for the journal, with the number of submissions being very high, and the journal publishing 50% more papers in 2015 than in 2014. The journal far eclipsed its forecasted number of papers, but recognizing the importance of rapid final publication, we published every paper in final form as quickly as possible. However, not all journals have the same policies and procedures. As an example, I picked an arbitrary date toward the end of 2015 − December 1, and looked at the number of published papers unassigned to an issue in an array of catalysis titles. One journal, which I will call Catalysis Journal G, had 192 papers “published” but unassigned to issues on that date, some with original web publication dates going back to the month of August. This number amounted to about 35% of the total papers in assigned issues in 2015 for that journal. This delay gives the papers very long gestation periods before assignment to an issue in the following calendar year. On that same date, ACS Catalysis had 9 papers in ASAP status with page numbers but not yet in their final, collated issue. Catalysis Journal G had previously published between X and 2X papers per issue in the first 9 months of the year, yet curiously reverted to publishing 60% in 2014 and >40% in 2015. It is this metric, authors “voting” with their submissions, that is the best metric of the health and vitality of the journal. We thank the chemical community for their continued support in this regard and look forward to a great year ahead. 1355
DOI: 10.1021/acscatal.6b00207 ACS Catal. 2016, 6, 1354−1355
