By: Mary Yess, ECS Deputy Executive Director & Chief Content Officer

Richard Poynder (@RickyPo) is well-known and well-respected in the open access community, especially for his “Open and Shut?” blog. Poynder has written an excellent post, which is part interview with Philip Cohen, founder of the SocArXiv preprint server, and part synopsis of the resurgent preprint server movement. The precursor of them all is arXiv, which was founded way back in 1991. Poynder asks, can preprint servers “gain sufficient traction, impetus, and focus to push the revolution the open access movement began in a more desirable direction?”

The post also talks a good bit about the preprint server framework created by the Center for Open Science (COS). ECS, who is working with COS on launching our own preprint server, gets several mentions in the article as well. In this age of 8-second attention spans, it’s a long article, but it’s well worth the read.

The winter 2016 issue of Interface is now available in the ECS Digital Library! This issue celebrates 25 years of Interface! Since its establishment, Interface has continuously provided Society members with top of the line technical articles about the latest developments in the fields of solid state and electrochemical science and technology. It also provides news and information about and for members.

This issue includes a special reflection article on its 25 years that contains highlights from every past quarterly issue of Interface, since its start in 1992. It also covers the highlights from PRiME 2016, where 67 countries were represented.

With Interface, members never miss out on updates such as Society news, people news, student news, and important technology highlights. Featured articles from the sensor division issue include:

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ECS is committed to open access through Free the Science, an initiative to completely open our research library and implement open science tools to further scientific advancement in our fields of research.

Our efforts are part of a much larger movement happening across the world. The Open Research Funders Group was announced late last year with foundational support from big names like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation, to name a few. Recently, the James S. McDonnell Foundation joined the group that is committed to increasing access to research outputs. Using their positions as major funding institutions, the group believes that openness accelerates discovery, reduces information-sharing gaps, encourages innovations, and promotes reproducibility. See a complete list of members of the Open Research Funders Group here.

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden announced in a speech to the American Association for Cancer Research that open access, open data, and new research incentives are the best way to contribute to the fight against cancer. In line with his Cancer Moonshot initiative, Biden laid out a series of policy priorities to incentivize open sharing of research data and open access to research articles. Learn more about the Cancer Moonshot initiative here.

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ECS isn’t the only one celebrating an anniversary this year. As we celebrate 115 years of excellence as a publisher, meeting convener, and multi-faceted scientific society, this year also marks an important 15-year milestone in the open access movement. In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative was hosted by the Open Society Foundations and to this day serves as a landmark meeting in communicating the importance and urgency of open access necessities.

The participants in the conference served as the founding researchers of open access, drafting a widely circulated declaration to articulate the goals of the open access (OA) movement. This declaration was signed by over 5,000 organizations and individuals, including ECS.

The declaration reads in part:

Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

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Think.Check.Submit.

ECS wants you to learn how to publish with a trusted journal.  A cross-industry initiative called Think.Check.Submit. is led by representatives from various organizations and publishers that encourages authors to find trusted journals for their research. It provides easy steps to follow about safe publishing as well as questions authors should be asking themselves.

ECS and our friends at Think.Check.Submit. are encouraging authors to:

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The peer review process is the heart of scholarly communication, assuring the publication of high-quality papers and strengthening the public’s perception of the science. Through peer review, editors, reviewers, and authors work together to ensure the work is coherent, rigorous, and adds to the scientific knowledge base.

However, peer review is not flawless. Namely, the labor intensive review-revise-resubmit process can be time consuming, potentially hampering scientific progress due to publication delay.

“Peer review is everything,” says Michael Hickner, member of the ECS Editorial Advisory Committee and professor at Pennsylvania State University. “However, it can be inefficient and sometimes mistakes happen, but it is our system. Peer review is our gold standard and a tradition of the academic community.”

To help combat some of the issues facing the peer review process today and further strengthen ECS’s manuscript review process, the Society has established the Editorial Advisory Committee to accelerate the peer review process and resolve discrepancies between reviewers on content quality.

“The core goal of the Editorial Advisory Committee is to lend expertise and perspective to the editors and associate editors,” Hickner says, who specializes in membranes for fuel cells and batteries. “I’m a technical consultant and I can weigh in on key papers; perhaps like a trusted super-reviewer.”

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Alice Suroviec is an associate professor at Berry College, where she focuses her research efforts on the development of microelectrodes and applications of electrochemistry to real-time detection of biological analytes in aqueous solutions. Suroviec has recently been appointed to the ECS Electrochemical Science & Technology Editorial Board as an associate editor for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES).

The Electrochemical Society: What do you hope to accomplish in your role as associate editor?

Alice Suroviec: I hope to make a stronger connection between the excellent work being presented at ECS meetings and JES. I would like to see that JES becomes a go-to journal for publishing the best work in our field. That we will be able to provide excellent peer-reviews in a timely manner and that the process is successful for both the authors and the reviewers.

ECS: How important is the peer review process in scholarly publications?

AS: The peer review process is critical to the process of disseminating scientific work. The sciences are by nature a team process. In the lab we work with other team members to produce novel research. The peer review process is an extension of that, where other experts in the author’s area weigh in to produce the best paper possible. Peer review in JES also provides a quality control so the readers of the journal know that they are reading reputable results.

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Thirty seven new issues of ECS Transactions have just been published from PRiME 2016; these are the “standard” issues and they cover a wide variety of topical interest areas.

The papers in these issues of ECST were presented in Honolulu, Hawaii October 2 to October 7, 2016. ECST Volume 75, Issues 1 to 54 can be found here.

Papers from these issues of ECST can be purchased as full-paper downloads. Please search for ECST issues from the PRiME 2016 meeting in the ECS Digital Library.

Venkat Subramanian is the Washington Research Foundation Innovation Professor of Chemical Engineering and Clean Energy at the University of Washington. His research efforts focus on computational models to bridge next-generation energy materials to battery management systems. Subramanian has recently been named a new technical editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, concentrating in the electrochemical engineering Topical Interest Area.

What do you hope to accomplish in your role as technical editor?
I am humbled and honored to be a Journal of The Electrochemical Society technical editor and I hope to help improve the impact factor and reach of our journal without losing the rigor we are known for. In particular, the electrochemical engineering topical interest area serves a critical role of taking fundamental electrochemistry to industrial applications. My current aim is to promote both traditional and new industrial applications of electrochemistry across different scales.

What are some of the biggest barriers for authors and for readers in the current publishing model?
Once I had a proposal rejected in my early academic career wherein the reviewer criticized me for not being aware of a recent article. I called the program officer to convey my unfortunate situation of not having access to the specified journal at my institution. While there are interlibrary loans or other such mechanisms, they are not optimal for making progress in research. Research requires instantaneous and immediate access. If you don’t have it, you lose out to your competitors who have such access. Note that every proposal is (and should be) reviewed on its merit and not resources available at a particular institution. Open access is critical for researchers and scientists.

What is the role of the Journal Impact Factor in scientific publishing?
Whether we like it or not, perception matters. Many academic departments have become highly interdisciplinary. Impact factor plays a big role in tenure and promotion decisions and there may be only one faculty member working in the field of electrochemistry. While I personally don’t read or benefit much from journals with high impact factor*, I will strive hard to promote and improve the impact factor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the perception about ECS journals in the scientific community.

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