Editorial pubs.acs.org/acssensors
Reflecting on How ACS Sensors Can Help Advance the Field of Sensing
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During Pittcon, we also held an Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) meeting, to hear from the sensing community regarding how we are tracking. Generally, the EAB was supportive of the journal’s progress, but did encourage us to try and be more involved with both early career researchers and industry, in particular. One way we are trying to engage with the broader community is through Twitter. As we want our Twitter feed to reflect the views of active bench researchers, rather than of your editors, we actually have a team of Twitter editors that are graduate students in Shanghai, Sydney, Geneva, Toronto, and Tempe. So, that feed tells you what these doctoral students think is hot in sensing. In a coming editorial, you will have the opportunity to read their views. We also got to engage with many other members of the analytical chemistry community, who attended Pittcon, through a reception held by the ACS measurement sciences journals: Analytical Chemistry, Journal of Proteome Research, and ACS Sensors. The other big event for us, at Pittcon, was hosting an ACS Sensors symposium entitled “Frontiers in Sensors: From Ultrasensitive to Single Molecule Devices”. In this symposium, five of us (Shana, Eric, Yitao, NJ, and Justin) spoke on our own research related to this theme. The session was jam-packed, with standing room only during some talks. So, we intend to keep running “Frontiers in Sensors” symposia each year at Pittcon. The idea is that each year there will be a different theme with different Associate Editors, Editorial Advisory Board members, and other prominent sensing scientists speaking along that theme. Next year the theme will be “In situ luminescent sensing, from cell to organism”, so come along to Pittcon 2018 in Orlando. If you have ideas for future themes, do not hesitate to let us know. Pittcon will be a regular feature on the ACS Sensors calendar. This is not because it is in the US, but primarily because it is a great conference that many of us descend upon from around the world regardless. So, if you are thinking of coming to a future Pittcon, come to our “Frontiers in Sensors” symposium; join any receptions we are involved in and hopefully come along, meet us, and let us know your views. It is your journal, and we want to do our best to make ACS Sensors what you want it to be. Nearly all the editorial team at Pittcon 2017. From left: Mike, Nella, Justin, Shana, Eric, Maarten, and NJ. Yitao unfortunately was detained by the cold weather of Chicago.
s an author, one tends to think of a journal as a venue in which to disseminate one’s science. But a journal can be, and is, much more than that. Think about the impact that high profile journals such as ACS Nano and Analytical Chemistry have had on their fields. They have really helped propel their respective areas forward, and helped shape the thinking of these fields. The most obvious way they do that is through what they choose to publish, and the publication criteria they set through their scope. As the journal’s impact factor goes up, that influence tends to increase. They also influence the direction of the field by publishing editorials and opinion pieces, being involved in policy, working with learned societies, being present at conferences, and just being part of that scientific community. At ACS Sensors, implicit in our vision to be the place where you choose to publish your very best sensing work, we very much want to be part of pushing the field of sensing to new heights. What we are doing, at ACS Sensors, is trying to advance the field we love, which includes having a scope that requires analytical uncertainties; demonstrating the sensor’s operation with complex samples; comparing the sensor performance to more established methods, where possible; and asking you to outline the sensor issue your work is addressing, and what the unmet need is. We are commissioning Sensor Issue papers to help us all identify unmet needs and challenges in particular branches of sensing. We are also actively involved in conferences, and next year, we’re hoping to hold our own symposium in Shanghai. But are we at all effective in helping to move the sensing field forward? We feel it is too early to say, of course, as ACS Sensors is just a baby in a field that has been around for over 50 years now. There are other, more established, journals that have blazed an impressive trail in building this field. The Pittcon Conference and Expo in Chicago, in March, was a time, however, to reflect on our beginnings, and what we are doing to help the field of sensing. It was the very first time the entire editorial team had been in the same place. In fact, some of us had never met, in person, before. It was an action-packed few days for us all. We held an editorial board meeting to discuss and reflect on our first 18 months of accepting papers. We discussed, at length, our editorial processes, with a view to better serving you, our authors. This involved perusing a lot of statistics on submission and acceptance rates, geographic diversity of authorship, and fields where we are and are not receiving submissions. One of the statistics that really jumped out was the time from receipt to acceptance for an ACS Sensors paper. ACS Sensors is as fast as, or faster than, all our direct competitor journals, for which this information was publicly available. It takes less than 9 weeks (2 months) from submission to acceptance. This is encouraging for you, as it means that if you submit to ACS Sensors, your science will be in the public domain quickly. It is encouraging for the editorial team, as it means we are doing our very best for our authors, while maintaining a rigorous reviewing process, following the ACS policy of having active researchers making decisions over what is published. © 2017 American Chemical Society
J. Justin Gooding, Editor-in-Chief The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Received: April 10, 2017 Published: April 28, 2017 455
DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.7b00240 ACS Sens. 2017, 2, 455−456
ACS Sensors
Editorial
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
J. Justin Gooding: 0000-0002-5398-0597 Yi-Tao Long: 0000-0003-2571-7457 Shana Kelley: 0000-0003-3360-5359 Maarten Merkx: 0000-0001-9484-3882 Michael Sailor: 0000-0002-4809-9826 Eric Bakker: 0000-0001-8970-4343
Yi-Tao Long, Associate Editor East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Nongjian Tao, Associate Editor Arizona State University, Tempe, United States
Shana Kelley, Associate Editor The University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Maarten Merkx, Associate Editor Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Michael Sailor, Associate Editor University of California, San Diego, United States
Eric Bakker, Associate Editor The University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Antonella Mazur, Managing Editor ACS Publications, Washington, DC, United States 456
DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.7b00240 ACS Sens. 2017, 2, 455−456
