Editor's Page pubs.acs.org/Organometallics
Editorial: Organometallics Is a Changin’The What, Why, and How
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veryone is busy. The proliferation of journals and social media and the expansion of content makes it hard to stay on top of the scientific literature. With over two million scientific manuscripts published each year, who could possibly keep up? At Organometallics, we value the contributions of our authors and our reviewers for their commitment to ensure that we are publishing the best and most exciting organometallic chemistry possible. Our editorial team has been examining our publication process for the last six months and is now rolling out several improvements designed to make submitting and reviewing for Organometallics as straightforward and efficient as possible. So to paraphrase Bob Dylan“Organometallics is a changin’”. When you receive a manuscript to review for Organometallics, several measures will have been taken to ensure quality. Before assignment to an Associate Editor, each manuscript is reviewed for completeness to make sure all of the data are present, Schemes and Figures are legible and are in chronological order, and the Supporting Information is complete and easily digested by the reviewer and ultimately the reader. Authors curious to know additional details of the specific requirements are encouraged to review the “Guidelines for Authors”.1 After the hard work of completing your manuscript, it is frustrating to have it returned to fix seemingly trivial matters. I understand your painmy first submission as Editor-in-Chief was returned for not following the guidelines! Nevertheless, this process makes peer review easier and ideally faster and allows reviewers to focus on the new chemistry rather than getting distracted by formatting issues and hunting for data. As part of this process, manuscripts reporting experimental data are also subject to an additional review. A team of trained chemists reviews the data to make sure compounds are fully characterized and X-ray data are complete and are of publishable quality. The team notes any items that may require additional follow-up and passes the manuscript and comments along to the assigned Editor. Please recognize that decisions for every manuscript are still in the hands of the editorial team. This process ensures that when you receive a manuscript to review for Organometallics, the data will have been thoroughly checked or a note will be included to alert you to what is missing or requires further review. We hope that as an author you appreciate the benefits of this process, as another fresh pair of eyes will be catching small errors prior to publication. More cosmetic changes have also been implemented. Our new reviewer form (Figure 1) went live on April 2, 2015, and may have a familiar look. It is inspired by the tabular format used at the Journal of the American Chemical Society and other ACS publications and asks questions about four criteria: significance, novelty, broad interest, and scholarly presentation. This section of the review form is to provide the editorial team more feedback to distinguish high-impact, exciting organometallic chemistry from the more routine and archival findings that are less appealing for publication. This section is followed by more specific technical questions exploring the adequacy of © 2015 American Chemical Society
Figure 1. New Organometallics reviewer form that went into effect April 2, 2015.
the conclusions, the accuracy of the references and quite importantly, the identification of any safety hazards. Even with the updated form, the most valuable part of the reviewer report is the written evaluation. No editorial decision at Organometallics is based solely upon answers to multiplechoice questions. The editorial team has selected you as a reviewer because we value your scientific opinionso please let us know what you think! Useful editorials have been published in other journals2 and disciplines3 on writing impactful reviewer reports, and many of the principles outlined are relevant to Organometallics. A valuable reviewer report goes beyond pointing out what is potentially wrong with a manuscript or telling us whether the paper deserves publication or not. The editorial team is looking for insight rather than a show of hands. It is most useful when a reviewer report begins with an introductory section, a few sentences or sometimes a few paragraphs summarizing the work and mentioning relevant literature. This will be used to calibrate the editors on the importance of the manuscript to the field. What, in your opinion, is the paper about? Often times reviewers and authors disagree on this point! What are the most important findings in the work? What will make it significant to the broad readership of Organometallics? Manuscript types have also changed. When I was appointed Editor-in-Chief, I asked a simple question“what are we publishing and why do we publish it?”. After careful analysis and considerable thought, we are no longer accepting Notes. While a beloved manuscript type to many of our loyal authors and readers, we believe the content of the Note is readily accommodated by Articles or Communications. Speaking of Communications, we have altered their format as well. Over the past few years, most journals have expanded to longer Published: July 13, 2015 3097
DOI: 10.1021/acs.organomet.5b00526 Organometallics 2015, 34, 3097−3098
Organometallics
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communications, sometimes in excess of four pages. During this time, emphasis on rapid dissemination of a hot result or an exciting compound seems to have been lost. Organometallics wants to return the focus to this type of finding and provide a high-quality venue for such discoveries. As a consequence, shorter two-page communications are encouraged and are expected to be the norm. Longer communications will still be considered, but authors seeking exceptions to the new format should explicitly request this in their cover letter and provide a detailed rationale. You may also notice that the deadline for revisions has been shortened. The goal of this change was to facilitate rapid publication of both articles and communications. If you need to extend this deadline for whatever reason, please just ask the Assigned Editor and provide a rationale. I am also excited about a new manuscript type that will likely appear later this year. Named “Tutorials”, these will be peerreviewed and topical accounts written from a personal perspective with the primary goal of integrating pedagogy into a timely research area. Organometallic chemists are by nature a pedagogical group who embrace fundamental principleswe are after all a field that still enjoys counting electrons! Many authors teach courses in the field to advanced undergraduates or graduate students, and many of our readers and students take these courses. The goal of this initiative is to provide a collection of papers that instructors can download and use to update course content; students will be able to use them as a primer for recent advances in important areas. We will encourage authors to upload slides and any other multimedia or graphical tools deemed valuable for teaching the material. These Tutorials will likely prove valuable outside the classroom too, as they will serve as readable overviews to various research areas. Those seeking to enter a new research area or explore a concept in an area outside of their immediate expertise will likely find these Tutorials interesting and accessible. At this stage, Tutorials are by invitation only, but prepublication inquiries are encouraged and should be sent to my editorial office (chirik-offi
[email protected]). The past six months have been educational but more importantly a rewarding time for me as Editor-in-Chief. I have enjoyed interacting with the community and look forward to meeting more authors, reviewers, and readers. Our goal is not only to have Organometallics continue to be the leading publication in the field but also for it to serve as a focal point for our collegial and vibrant community. As always, please feel free to send us any suggestions on how we can capture the best chemistry of the metal−carbon bond and do not forget to follow us on Twitter @Orgmet_ACS.
Paul J. Chirik, Editor-in-Chief
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Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, United States
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) http://pubs.acs.org/paragonplus/submission/orgnd7/orgnd7_ authguide.pdf. (2) (a) Buriak, J. M. Chem. Mater. 2015, 27, 3783. (b) Weiss, P. S. ACS Nano 2008, 2, 177. (3) (a) Groves, T. Nature 2006, DOI: 10.1038/nature04995. (b) Nat. Phys. 2009, 5, 775. DOI: 10.1038/nphys1440 3098
DOI: 10.1021/acs.organomet.5b00526 Organometallics 2015, 34, 3097−3098
