Comment▼ Welcome to ES&T ’s Asia office
H
appy New Year! I’m pleased to announce the January 2006 opening of the ES&T Asia office, which is located in Beijing and led by our new Associate Editor Guibin Jiang (p 7). Jiang has served for the past two years as a member of our Editorial Advisory Board, and he has already helped to expand ES&T’s reach in Asia, particularly in China. He is a professor of environmental chemistry and deputy director of the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Jiang, together with two of our most senior and experienced Associate Editors, Ron Hites and Walter Giger, will be handling papers in environmental organic analytical chemistry. Each Associate Editor handles papers in their area of special expertise plus a wide range of related topics. To provide further expertise in Beijing, Jincai Zhao, with the Institute of Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is joining ES&T’s Editorial Advisory Board. (We also welcome Alan Elzerman from Clemson University to the board.) Jiang and Zhao will help us expand the number of papers submitted from Asia and involve more Asian scientists and engineers in the review process. In coming years, we hope to add members to the Editorial Advisory Board from Japan, Korea, India, and elsewhere in Asia, while also expanding our presence in Europe. Our goal is to be the best international journal in environmental science and technology and to report the latest research from all over the world. Already, the number of manuscripts submitted from Asia has been growing exponentially. In 1967, when ES&T was founded, 98% of all the technical articles published were submitted by U.S. authors. By 2005, more than 50% of all papers were submitted by non-U.S. corresponding authors. Japan was the first Asian country whose authors published widely in ES&T, and we are grateful for their scientific leadership. Papers from Japan increased quickly in the 1980s and 1990s, and Japanese authors continue to publish the most papers from Asia, roughly 5% of all papers published in the journal. Now, submissions from Korea, China, and India are increasing prolifically, with about 20% more papers each year. And the quality of the submissions is also improving rapidly,
© 2006 American Chemical Society
resulting in more papers published each year. We expect this trend to accelerate. So much has been written about globalization, I cannot possibly add to it here. But international scientific publishing is one manifestation of globalization that can have a tremendously beneficial impact on environmental science and, eventually, on the quality of our atmosphere, land, and water. Indeed, parts of Asia have severe environmental problems, but they also have a rapidly developing educational infrastructure for producing high-quality science and technology. Asia can leapfrog the mistakes of the West, create new knowledge, and invent novel technologies by virtue of its intellectual vitality. Furthermore, communications advances in the global village allow teams of environmental scientists from all over the world to bring interdisciplinary expertise to bear on the toughest scientific problems. We see this already at ES&T—about 25% of our research articles now originate from international teams. Imagine if the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tried to tackle global warming with scientists from just one country. It’s unthinkable. Today, you can assemble the best teams from every country to work on the most intractable scientific problems—and the environment should be first and foremost on that list. At ES&T, we hope to publish those scientific papers and earth-changing technologies and to cover the news of their discovery in our news and features section. So we welcome our Asia office, and we encourage environmental scientists and engineers throughout Asia to consider ES&T as your first choice in environmental journals. We invite your best scientific papers; we need your help in peer-reviewing manuscripts and in reporting the latest scientific news on the environment in Asia.
Jerald L. Schnoor Editor
[email protected] JANUARY 1, 2006 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY ■ 3
