Seventeen new issues of ECS Transactions have just been published for the PRiME ECS Meeting.

The papers in these issues of ECST will be presented in Honolulu, Hawaii October 2 to October 7, 2016. ECST Volume 75, Issues 1 to 17 can be found here.

New for 2016: these issues of ECST can also be purchased in the NEW ECS ONLINE STORE as full-text digital downloads. You can also purchase these issues as a CD/USB combo in the online store. Please search for ECST issues from the PRiME meeting in the ECS online store here.

While at the ECS Meeting in Hawaii, please stop by the ECS Publications Booth. There, you can purchase additional CD/USB copies of the PRiME issues and get additional information on all ECS Publications. The ECS Publications booth is located in the Honolulu Convention Center, Hall 2 and is open during all Registration hours.

At ECS, we offer your institution a subscription to ECS Plus, which gives your researchers access to a wealth of high-ranking, highly-cited research in electrochemistry and solid state science.

With ECS Plus, authors can publish an unlimited number of articles in our high-ranking journals (Journal of The Electrochemical Society and ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology) as Open Access, at no additional cost to them or your institution.

Please don’t hesitate to email Anna Olsen, Senior Content Associate and Library Liaison, with any questions you may have, or with your order!

Exciting news for PRiME 2016: Stop by the ECS Publication Booth for a chance to win 1 of 5 Open Access Credits! These credits may be used to publish your paper as OA in either JES or JSS.

Please stop by the ECS Publications Booth, located in the Honolulu Convention Center, Hall 2 Foyer, any time during Registration Hours and drop off your business card to enter the raffle. ECS will be raffling off 5 Open Access credits during the PRiME meeting (each credit is worth $800)!

Questions? Please email oa@electrochem.org and we’ll see you in Honolulu!

Lithium-air batteries are viewed by many as a potential next-generation technology in energy storage. With the highest theoretical energy density of all battery devices, Li-air could revolutionize everything from electric vehicles to large-scale grid storage. However, the relatively young technology has a few barriers to overcome before it can be applied. A new study published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) is taking a fundamental step forward in advancing Li-air through the development of mixed metal catalyst that could lead to more efficient electrode reactions in the battery.

The paper, entitled “In Situ Formed Layered-Layered Metal Oxide as Bifunctional Catalyst for Li-Air Batteries,” details a cathode catalyst composed of three transition metals (manganese, nickel, and cobalt), which can create the right oxidation state during the battery cycling to enable both the catalysis of the charge and the discharge reaction.

Future opportunities

According to K.M. Abraham, co-author of the paper, the manganese allows for the catalysis of the oxygen reduction reaction while the cobalt catalyzes the charge reaction of the battery.

“This offers opportunities for future research to develop similar materials to optimize the catalysis of the Li-air battery using one material that will combine the functions of these mixed metal oxides,” Abraham says.

(more…)

Scholarly publishing news has been buzzing about 1science’s recently published large-scale study on the impact of Open Access. This study analyzed more than 3 million papers and found that Open Access papers have a 50% greater citation advantage than papers in subscription-based journals.

Meanwhile, ECS has also been performing its own (much smaller-scale) research to confirm this hypothesis. In May 2015, ECS launched a study, led by Daniela Solomon, a librarian at Case Western Reserve University, to examine the citation advantage for Open Access articles published in Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES).

The study looks at both downloads and citations of articles published in a single volume of JES. This brief note outlines the results at the end of one year; however, we consider these results preliminary as we will continue to run the study for another year.

We will publish our findings again when the study closes: in the meantime we’d be interested in hearing your comments and thoughts on our findings so far.

(more…)

Children struggle to learn when they don’t have science labs and libraries. Learning becomes difficult in classrooms that are falling apart, or where children are expected to sit on the floor because they have neither desks nor chairs.

A lack of infrastructure is just one contributor to South Africa’s entrenched and ongoing educational inequality. There is another, less frequently discussed issue that is deepening this inequality: access to quality peer-reviewed information.

Such information should be available to all South Africans whether they are school children, university students, researchers or citizen scientists. This will encourage lifelong self-learning. It will spur continued research and innovation. Access to information can bolster education, training, empowerment and human development.

International Open Access Week offers a good opportunity to explore how South Africa can improve its citizens’ access to information.

Opening up access

It has been more than 21 years since apartheid ended, but a distinction remains between South Africa’s “rich” and “poor” universities. One of the reasons for this distinction is the richer institutions’ ability to invest in research resources. They can afford expensive subscriptions to databases which contain a wealth of research – ironically funded by taxpayers’ money.

The historically disadvantaged and predominantly black universities can’t afford such subscriptions. Their academics also can’t contribute to such resources, because authors are expected to pay a fee for the “privilege” of being published.

As university budgets are slashed, even wealthier institutions are beginning to struggle with subscription and publication fee costs.

(more…)

The device is able to convert solar energy into hydrogen at a rate of 14.2 percent, and has already been run for more than 100 hours straight.
Image: Infini Lab/EPFL

One of the biggest barriers between renewables and widespread grid implementation has been the issue of intermittency. How can we meet a nation’s energy demands with solar when the sun goes down?

In an effort to move past these barriers toward a cleaner energy infrastructure, a new paper published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society describes an effective, low-cost solution for storing solar energy.

The research team from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is looking to covert solar energy into hydrogen through water electrolysis. At its core, the concept revolves around using solar-produced electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, leaving clean hydrogen to be stored as future energy or even as a fuel.

But this idea is not new to the scientific community. However, the research published in JES provides answer to continuous barriers in this field related to stability, scaling, and efficiency.

(more…)

There’s only one week left to enter ECS’s Open Access Week Competition! Don’t forget to submit your brief 200-400 word essay for a chance to win one of two cash prizes and additional funding for your ECS Student Chapter.

Prizes:

1st prize: $250 to the individual, $500 to the affiliated ECS Student Chapter*

2nd prize: $100 to the individual, $250 to the affiliated ECS Student Chapter*

*In the event that there is no affiliated ECS Student Chapter, this prize money will be donated to the ECS Free the Science Fund. If a report is written by more than one individual, any prize money will be shared equally between those individuals.

Submissions Open: August 8, 2016

Submissions Close: September 15, 2016 (DEADLINE EXTENDED!)

Download our poster promoting the competition to distribute on your campus.

Not interested in participating, but want to get involved? Check out the Open Access Week website for information or inspiration: http://www.openaccessweek.org/

RULES AND MORE INFORMATION 

SUBMIT NOW!

NASA recently announced that all research funded by the space agency will be accessible to anyone looking to access the data at absolutely no cost.

The new public web portal, called PubSpace, was established in response to NASA’s new policy, which requires that all research funded by NASA and published in peer-reviewed journals must be open to the public within one year of its initial publication.

“At NASA, we are celebrating this opportunity to extend access to our extensive portfolio and scientific and technical publications,” NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman said in a press release. “Through open access and innovation we invite the global community to join us in exploring Earth, air, and space.”

However, the entire body of NASA-funded research will not be accessible in PubSpace. Materials and patents governed by personal privacy, proprietary, or security laws will not be housed in the new database.

NASA’s new policy and PubSpace is a direct response to a request from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for federal funding agencies to make papers and data more easily accessible to other researchers and the public.

(more…)

A large-scale study on the impact of open access has recently been released, finding that OA papers have a 50 percent greater citation advantage than papers published in subscription-based journals.

The analysis of more than three million papers determined that a journal’s move toward open access publishing is necessary to retain relevance in the field. Additionally, further results point to the face that traditional subscription-based journals will lose their relevance for researchers and governments if they continue to block access to research via paywalls.

(READ: “For-science of For-profit?“)

This from Digital Journal:

The new research also shows that the widely held belief that open access papers have a greater impact due to them being available earlier than their commercially published versions is not consistent with the large-scale data collected by 1science. In fact, based on a tie series comprising more than 17.4 million papers published between 2000 and 2015, it is clear that open access still suffers from the effect of embargoes enforced by traditional publishers who maintain that they require that delay to keep the subscription model alive.

(more…)