Editorial pubs.acs.org/acssensors
Welcome to the First Anniversary Issue of ACS Sensors elcome to the first anniversary issue of ACS Sensors. We think it has been a highly successful year for your new journal and there are a lot of people to acknowledge for this success. First and foremost, we want to thank you, our readers, reviewers, and authors. You are the most important element of any journal’s success, as none of it is possible without your contributions. We want to thank you for the time and energy you put into the journal and the trust you placed in us by submitting some of your best work to ACS Sensors. We also thank our Editorial Advisory Board, many of whom have published papers in ACS Sensors in the first year, for advising us on the direction of the journal. There are many other people to thank for helping make the management of the journal so efficient. From the Peer Review Analysts that manage the administrative aspects of your papers while they are going through peer review, Sue Liu in Sydney who writes the Introducing Our Authors and assists the Editor-In-Chief in Sydney, the PhD students in Tempe, Toronto, Geneva, Shanghai, and Sydney who are the Twitter editors that create such an interesting Twitter feed, the production team that prepares the papers for publication once accepted, and the marketing team that have kept the journal in the forefront of your mind and put the look of the journal together, which we love. Thank you all. With the plethora of journals these days, there is a definite risk that a new journal may not take off. In relation to sensors there were definitely many sensing journals already publishing papers prior to the first issue of ACS Sensors last January. The concept of ACS Sensors was conceived by Tammy Hanna and Antonella Mazur (our Managing Editor) from the ACS. What they identified was that there was no broadly scoped sensing journal published by a Society publisher that was a true home for the entire sensing community; this is the gap ACS Sensors fills. We think the strong brand of the ACS, and the stringent acceptance criteria, have helped the journal be accepted by the community. We also think the scope is important, covering all aspects of sensors that detect chemical or biological species or processes, which means ACS Sensors is the broadest scoped sensing journal. So, how successful has ACS Sensors been in its first year? In pure numbers terms, we have published 204 articles in our first volume, which is just a small percentage of the number of submissions we have received. This number of submissions has exceeded all expectations. Some of our authors have submitted several papers with a number of authors having three papers accepted within the first year! We recently also became indexed by Thomson-Reuters. We will not have an impact factor until mid-2018 (and even then only a half impact factor) but the first citation numbers are encouraging. The most cited papers have already reached double figures (DOIs: 10.1021/acssensors.5b00142 and 10.1021/acssensors.5b00136). Other papers have attracted considerable media attention both in print and on television, such as a wearable tattoo sensor for alcohol (DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.6b00356) and a wearable sun exposure sensor (DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.6b00244).
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© 2017 American Chemical Society
The editorial team has been working hard and managed to get the average time for submission to acceptance to below 8.5 weeks, which is as fast, or faster in most cases, as our competitors. To keep your papers moving rapidly through the editing process, the ACS has been adding to our original editorial team of 5 scientists with Maarten Merkx joining us last October and Michael Sailor as of January 1 this year. Maarten’s expertise in synthetic biology and protein engineering, and Michael’s expertise in optical sensing and nanomaterials really reflects the directions from which we think some of the most exciting new sensor science is coming from. We are striving to be the sensor journal that publishes the papers that help define the future of sensors. We are often asked in which areas we would like to receive more submissions. We have already published top class papers on all areas of sensor science. So, it is not so much papers on a given field we are hoping for, but more related to the style of the papers and science. The journal scope outlines that “Papers may focus on sensor development for commercialization or developing sensors that are used to provide new scientific knowledge”. Most of the papers we receive relate to potentially commercialized sensors. With this type of paper, authors have embraced our requirements for challenging the sensor in the complex samples for which the sensor is intended and providing uncertainties with their data, but seldom is the performance of the sensor verified with an independent analytical method; and we would be delighted if more papers were written with the sensor issue being addressed made very clear in the introduction. The importance we place on papers reporting issues related to sensing is the very reason we instituted the Sensor Issues manuscript type. Regarding the scientific knowledge papers, we think there is enormous scope for sensors to play a pivotal role in scientific discovery. We are certainly striving for more papers in this area. Many such papers are published in journals related to other scientific fields, and we think the elegance of the sensor design to address the scientific question is often missed. All in all, we are absolutely delighted about the quality of papers being submitted to ACS Sensors. It makes us feel the future is bright for both ACS Sensors and the field of sensing science. For your editorial team it makes the journal incredibly rewarding to edit. We really hope you are enjoying reading the papers and we are looking forward to seeing and reading what 2017 brings.
J. Justin Gooding, Editor-in-Chief The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Received: January 4, 2017 Published: January 27, 2017 1
DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.7b00004 ACS Sens. 2017, 2, 1−2
ACS Sensors
Editorial
Michael Sailor: 0000-0002-4809-9826 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Eric Bakker, Associate Editor The University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Yitao Long, Associate Editor East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
Nongjian Tao, Associate Editor Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States
Shana Kelley, Associate Editor The University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Maarten Merkx, Associate Editor Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Michael Sailor, Associate Editor University of California, San Diego, California, United States
Antonella Mazur, Managing Editor
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ACS Publications, Washington, DC, United States
AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
J. Justin Gooding: 0000-0002-5398-0597 Eric Bakker: 0000-0001-8970-4343 Shana Kelley: 0000-0003-3360-5359 Maarten Merkx: 0000-0001-9484-3882 2
DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.7b00004 ACS Sens. 2017, 2, 1−2
