Editorial pubs.acs.org/OrgLett
Cite This: Org. Lett. 2018, 20, 7747−7747
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Farewell and Thanks often had authors write to express gratitude to a reviewer for suggestions that improved their Letter. I would also especially like to thank the staff in the Editor-inChief’s office: Carol Carr, Larissa Tóth, and Andrew Fleming. They have made my job so much easier by providing excellent support for all of the Associate Editors as well as for our authors and reviewers. Many of you have been the recipient of their professional and caring support. Recognizing the need to provide reliable high-quality data, six years ago we expanded our staff to include a data analyst, Angela Hunter, who has been vital to improving our standards and ensuring that they are met. My thanks to Angie for this valuable service to us and to the community of chemists. In closing, I am extremely proud and grateful to have been a part of Organic Letters from its birth through its first 20 years, and I am especially proud that it has become the premier venue for the best quality communications in organic chemistry. I know that I leave Organic Letters in excellent hands with Professor Erick Carreira as Editor-in-Chief. I wish him and his team the very best of good fortune and look forward to watching Organic Letters thrive and grow under their care and leadership.
Since this will be the last issue of my tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Organic Letters, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the American Chemical Society (ACS) and, in particular, the ACS Global Production Operations for having faith in me as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief for their important effort to provide high-level communications in organic chemistry at a more affordable cost. Over the past 20 years, the ACS Global Production Operations staff has been extremely supportive and encouraging as we developed our procedures to ensure the publication of the very best communications in organic chemistry as quickly as possible without losing quality. Our inaugural Associate Editors, Professors Peter Beak, Cynthia Burrows, Scott Denmark, C. Dale Poulter, Daniel Rich, and Jeffrey Winkler, demonstrated great faith in this new journal and in me, and for that I thank them. I also thank all Associate Editors, past and present, for their efforts in making Organic Letters “exactly where you want to be”! As we began the journal it was certainly a very exciting time since we were the first ACS journal to allow web submission of manuscripts. The learning curve was indeed steep as we coped with diverse PDFs that turned out to be not quite as portable as their name advertised and we also realized that technical support for authors coping with a new submission system was a 24/7 necessity! The rewards of pioneering web submission, however, were great! We quickly received many grateful notes from authors, especially from Asia and Australia. Web submission was clearly a game changer for those authors, who no longer needed to stuff multiple copies of their papers into envelopes and hope for the best. I would also like to thank the Organic Chemistry Community for embracing Organic Letters. As I reported in a previous Editorial, we published our first letter on the web in May 1999, and by April of 2000 we had published our 1000th Letter. One of the joys of editing a research journal is in guiding a researcher’s first paper to publication. Over the years, we have shared in that excitement. One of our Editorial Advisory Board members, Professor Qiu Wang at Duke University, recently shared her experience: “Organic Letters published my first paper in 2004 while I was in graduate school at Emory, the first paper from my independent group at Duke in 2013, and also my most cited paper to date.” We have also been privileged to publish the best research from leading organic chemists throughout their careers. In some cases we have published the last work of an illustrious career. See ref 22 in the Gilbert Stork et al. paper on the synthesis of (±)-4-methylenegermine: (22) ... “At this point, we realized that we did not have enough material.... One would have to restart the whole synthesis. But I (G.S.) am now 95 years old....” As I have said many times during my tenure as Editor-inChief, I am grateful to the authors who trust us with their research and to our reviewers who contribute so greatly in providing essential added value to our submissions. We have © 2018 American Chemical Society
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Amos B. Smith, III, Editor-in-Chief AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Received: November 9, 2018 Published: December 21, 2018 7747
DOI: 10.1021/acs.orglett.8b03589 Org. Lett. 2018, 20, 7747−7747
