Editorial pubs.acs.org/JPCA
Editorial for January 2017 for JPC A/B/C
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appy New Year to the authors, reviewers, and readers of The Journal of Physical Chemistry (JPC). 2016 was another active year for the Journal, with both submissions and citations continuing to rise and over 6000 papers published. 2017 is the 20th anniversary of the founding of JPC A and JPC B, which were started in 1997 when the original JPC was split into two journals to accommodate significant growth during the 1980s and 1990s. So although JPC dates back to 1896, the modern era really began in 1997. We thank the authors and reviewers of the journal for continuing to support this worldwide community effort.
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JOURNAL POLICY STATEMENTS As we do every year, we have published an updated version of the Information for Authors on the Journal web page (see http://pubs.acs.org/page/jpcbfk/submission/authors.html). We have added an initial submission checklist to aid authors with the preparation and submission of their manuscript in JPC, and to avoid potential delays with the review process. One significant change is the clarification of several Journal Policies in the author information document. This information is repeated in Figure 1. The first is a description of the Journal policy regarding reproducibility of results. This policy has been in place for several years and requires that sufficient information be provided to ensure that results presented can be reproduced by others. This means that potential energy surfaces and experimental/computational parameters need to be included as Supporting Information in publications or be available on public Web sites. This policy, which is now highlighted early in the Information for Authors, is consistent with the policies of several other related journals. The Information for Authors also includes statements about the Journal’s expectations for papers concerned with nanomaterials and with computational work. These are the standards that the Editors apply when determining if such papers fall within the scope of JPC. Another statement reflects the use of preprint servers. For some time, the Journal has allowed authors to deposit their initial drafts of the manuscript in a suitable preprint server such as arXiv and bioRxiv without adversely affecting the review process when the paper is submitted for publication. With the announcement of the upcoming ChemRxiv preprint server, the Journal’s policy has been updated to reflect this practice (also included in Figure 1) and is available at http://pubs.acs.org/page/policy/prior/index. html. The final statement in Figure 1 describes the inclusion of safety and health information in the experimental section.
Figure 1. Journal policy statements.
Choice”. Clicking on these provides new information, including catalogs of all the Special Issues, and links to the collection of Editors’ Choice articles that have appeared in JPC. Additional tabs appear on the right side under “Featured Content”. The “Highlights” tab provides a list of recent Review and Feature Articles, Editorials, and Viewpoints (more about these below). The “Virtual Issues” tab contains links to past and present Virtual Issues (also described below), and “JPC in the News” provides information about JPC articles that have been recently discussed in the media. Note also that the right column of the web page gives you the latest tweets from the JPC Twitter feed and also contains a link to the Journal’s Facebook account. We thank Sai Konda, Managing Editor, for the significant effort he put into implementing these features.
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WEB REFRESH An important change to the Journal that started in January but took much of the year to be completed was a refresh of the Journal web pages. Figure 2 shows a recent screenshot of the JPC A webpage, which includes a number of changes from previous years. Note particularly the tabs on the upper left side, where the first choice is “Articles ASAP”. Further to the right are new tabs, including “Special Issues” and “ACS Editors’ © 2017 American Chemical Society
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PROCESSING TIMES During the past few years, a combination of better technology and hard work by the office staff has resulted in improved manuscript processing times. Though we were always Published: January 12, 2017 1
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.6b11794 J. Phys. Chem. A 2017, 121, 1−3
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Figure 2. Portion of a screenshot of the JPC A webpage, showing the new tabs (upper left and middle right).
successful in this category, we are proud to say that for the first half of 2016, the mean time between submission and
acceptance for manuscripts submitted to JPC was 9.4 weeks. Although many editors and staff have contributed to this, 2
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.6b11794 J. Phys. Chem. A 2017, 121, 1−3
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the research areas associated with the respective journal section. The 2016 JPC Lectureships were awarded to JPC A: Wen Li (Wayne State University) JPC B: Julie Biteen (University of Michigan) JPC C: J. R. Schmidt (University of Wisconsin) Each award winner gave a terrific lecture at the ACS National Meeting in Philadelphia in a session that immediately preceded the joint JPC/Physical Division reception. We will be awarding the JPC Lectureships again in 2017 and look forward to the lectures, which will be given at the Fall ACS National Meeting in Washington, DC.
Davine Henderson, our Coordinating Editor, deserves much of the credit for making this happen.
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EDITORS’ CHOICE ARTICLES ACS Editors’ Choice is a program whereby one newly published paper, selected from all ACS journals, is posted online each day as a fully open access paper. A list of all the ACS Editors’ Choice articles is available at http://pubs.acs.org/ editorschoice/. This list can be filtered according to journal and searched in a variety of ways. Alternately, articles in the respective part of JPC can also be found via the ACS Editors’ Choice tab below the carousel module on the Journals’ homepages (Figure 2). JPC continues to be well-represented in ACS Editors’ Choice.
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SOCIAL MEDIA Thanks to Sai Konda, there has been a lot of activity on our Facebook and Twitter (@JPhysChem) pages. We now have journal-specific hashtags on social media like #jpcfeature, #jpcreview, #jpcfestschrift, #jpchighlight, #jpcliveslides, etc. that allow for a quick search and easy discoverability. Look for #jpc120 to read interesting stories about the Journal’s 120 year history. If you have news of broad interest to the physical chemistry community, please contact Sai at
[email protected].
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SPECIAL ISSUES A catalog of the Special Issues that have appeared in JPC A/B/ C is available at http://pubs.acs.org/page/jpchax/specialissues/index.html. In 2016, we published Festschrift Issues for Bruce C. Garrett, James G. Anderson, Ronnie Kosloff, William M. Gelbart, Piergiorgio Casavecchia and Antonio Lagana, Kohei Uosaki, J. Andrew McCammon, and Richard P. Van Duyne. In addition, we published a symposium Special Issue entitled “Spectroscopy and Dynamics of Medium-Sized Molecules and Clusters: Theory, Experiment, and Applications”. This Special Issue was our first “Virtual” Special Issue in which the papers are published shortly after acceptance, rather than waiting for all papers to be accepted. In 2017, we plan to publish more Special Issues in the Virtual Issue format. Although we have a limited capacity for Special Issues, we continue to seek suggestions for new Special Issues that highlight cutting edge research in physical chemistry.
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TRANSITIONS This year there were several important transitions among the Journal editors. Greg Scholes (Princeton) became the Deputy Editor of JPC Letters, replacing Prashant Kamat (Notre Dame) who moved to become the EIC of ACS Energy Letters. This led to Juan Bisquert (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) moving to JPC Letters, and Narayan Pradhan (Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, India) replacing him in JPC A/ B/C. We also appointed Maria Forsyth (Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia) as A/B/C Senior Editor, but she will move to JPC Letters later in 2017. Also, Hua Guo (University of New Mexico) joined JPC A/B/C in the spring, replacing Ken Jordan (University of Pittsburgh) who retired from the Journal. We especially thank Prashant, who served the journal for 13 years, and Ken, who served for 12 years. In February 2016, we welcomed Sai Konda (S_Konda@acs. org) as the new Managing Editor of JPC. Sai is now an important component of the Journal, handling many of the dayto-day activities associated with the flow of manuscripts, as well as numerous functions that keep us in touch with ACS in Washington, DC, and Columbus, OH. Sai and the Deputy Editors work closely with the EIC Office to handle the topdown functions of the Journal while the editors process manuscripts, making sure that we maintain our high standards while giving authors fair consideration for their manuscripts. We thank our JPC office staff in Evanston, the Deputy Editor Assistants, and the many Journal Assistants for their tireless work to make the journal run smoothly and efficiently. We are looking forward to a productive 2017, and we hope that all of you, our authors and reviewers, have a prosperous and successful year!
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FEATURE ARTICLES, REVIEW AND MINI-REVIEW ARTICLES, VIEWPOINTS As mentioned above, a compilation of articles in these categories is now available under “Featured Content” on the JPC web pages. Authors or readers who have ideas for these articles are encouraged to contact one of the editors. We often use Viewpoints, which are fully open access, to highlight the scientific content of meetings, so there are many possible opportunities for Viewpoints, and this is a good opportunity for senior graduate students and postdocs to write articles. The latest Viewpoint summarizes the key proceedings at the 4th International Conference on Chemical Bonding that was held on Kauai Island, Hawaii, July 14−26, 2016.
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VIRTUAL ISSUES A Virtual Issue Celebrating Our 120th Anniversary of JPC was published in December 2016. Another, In Memory of Ahmed Zewail, who passed away in August 2016, was devoted to his science. An Atmospheric Physical Chemistry Virtual Issue was published in July 2016. A catalog of all JPC’s Virtual Issues can be found at http://pubs.acs.org/page/jpc-virtual-issues/index. html.
Anne B. McCoy, Deputy Editor Joan-Emma Shea, Deputy Editor Catherine J. Murphy, Deputy Editor George C. Schatz, Editor-in-Chief
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JPC LECTURESHIPS The JPC Lectureships are awards given to young scientists from around the world who have a record of publishing in JPC, are members or affiliates of the Physical Division of the ACS, and have made major impacts on the field of physical chemistry in
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS. 3
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.6b11794 J. Phys. Chem. A 2017, 121, 1−3
