Editorial pubs.acs.org/JPCL
The JPCL New Year’s Editorial Accompanying Prashant Kamat’s move to ACS Energy Letters, Juan Bisquert (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) joined JPCL as a senior editor, and Kate Luckey was appointed coordinating editor. She is based at Princeton University. We also welcomed Sai Konda as our new managing editor. In 2017 we are pleased to welcome Maria Forsyth (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) as a new JPCL senior editor. We thank the JPC office staff in Evanston and our journal assistants for the important roles they play supporting the foundation of JPCL. We are confident that 2017 will be another terrific year for JPCL, and we wish you, our authors, readers, and reviewers, a happy and successful year.
H
appy New Year to the authors, reviewers, and readers of The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (JPCL). This year we have seen some changes to the journal editors behind the scenes, while the science published continues to increase in impact and scope. Prashant Kamat, who led JPCL for the first 6 years, has transitioned to ACS Energy Letters, and we wish him great success with that new journal. His vision for JPCL as a high-impact and rapid way to publish top physical chemistry papers has been an immense success. Greg Scholes (Princeton University) took over as deputy editor of JPCL early in 2016 and has endeavored to put as much energy and enthusiasm into the journal as Prashant did. We all hope the authors and referees continue to be excited about JPCL, and we strongly encourage you to consider this journal for your best work in 2017. Since the journal’s debut in 2010, our articles have been cited more than 100,000 times, and the journal’s impact factor has grown at a steady pace. Although the 2016 numbers will not be released until mid-2017, we are on track to see an impact factor over 8 for the second year in a row. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that our submissions continue to rise. As of November 22, we have received 8% more original Letter submissions in 2016 compared with the same time period in 2015. Despite the high volume of submissions, we pride ourselves on an authorfriendly process from submission to decision. In 2016 our editors delivered a first decision within 11 days (on average), and our average time to final acceptance was less than 6 weeks. This fast turnaround is made possible not only by our excellent editors but also by our dedicated reviewers, who provided 2985 reviews in the first 11 months of the year. An impressive 91% of these reports were received within 2 weeks. In August we launched Spotlights, an initiative meant to expand our reach beyond researchers. By publishing accessible summaries of select articles in each issue, we hope to broaden the readership of the journal and increase recognition of the fine work that our authors are doing. Spotlights are among the most accessed articles in each issue, and, over time, that could translate into increased downloads of the articles highlighted, higher citation counts, and a boost to our already robust impact factor. We will have a fuller picture of the impact of Spotlights at the one-year mark, but in the meantime we will continue to spread the word about all of the excellent work we publish. JPCL encourages submissions from all areas of physical chemistry. We do not select research areas based on their impact, but instead we look for exceptional new physical insights and breakthroughs that will interest a broad crosssection of physical chemists. In 2016 we have seen an incredible number of submissions reporting all aspects of research about “perovskite” materials, properties, and devices, a testament to the revolution we are seeing in this field. Two-thirds of our top 20 downloaded papers published in 2016 are about perovskitesthose papers have been downloaded more than 64,000 times! The remaining third are predominantly Perspective articles that cover a diverse range of topics. © 2017 American Chemical Society
Gregory D. Scholes Princeton University
Juan Bisquert Universitat Jaume I
Benedetta Mennucci University of Pisa
Oleg Prezhdo University of Southern California
Francisco Zaera University of California, Riverside
Timothy Zwier Purdue University
George C. Schatz
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Northwestern University
AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Gregory D. Scholes: 0000-0003-3336-7960 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Published: January 5, 2017 41
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.6b02781 J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2017, 8, 41−41
