Back in March, I wrote a post gushing about the utility of ORCID identifiers. For those of you who haven’t seen it you can find it here, and for those of you who have seen it, but have yet to sign up, it’s probably time to think about it!

Because everyone likes lists, here’s ECS’s top 5 reasons to register for your ORCID ID today:

1. Differentiate yourself.
Think about how many “J. Smith”s there are in the world. ORCID lets you stand out from the crowd and ensures that your research is appropriately attributed.

2. Names change, affiliations change, e-mail accounts change.
There is little about an individual’s research profile that is static – people find new jobs, change names, or just switch from Outlook to Gmail. No matter what the change is, your professional contacts will be able to find your current information—even if they’re reaching out to you about a paper you wrote four jobs ago or in grad school.

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LIVE WEBCAST: April 30th at 5:00pm
Find out more and register today!

Flow Batteries for Grid-Scale Energy Storage
Large-scale energy storage is required to meet a multitude of current energy challenges. These challenges include modernizing the grid, incorporating intermittent renewable energy sources (so as to dispatch continuous electrical energy), improving the efficiency of electricity transmission and distribution, and providing flexibility of storage independent of geographical and geological location. Read more.

How to Publish in ECS Journals
ECS publications span the entire subject area of electrochemistry and solid-state science. The Society publishes peer-reviewed technical journals, proceedings, monographs, conference abstracts, and a quarterly news magazine. The Society’s oldest title, Journal of The Electrochemical Society, has been in continuous publication since the Society’s founding in 1902.

Presented by Robert F. Savinell
Editor of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society and ECS Electrochemistry Letters.

ECS Student Member Benefits, Awards, and Travel Grants
ECS offers a variety of options for students to get involved. Tune in to find out more.

Presented by Beth Fisher
ECS Associate Director of Development & Membership Services

Space is limited! Register today!

Hosted by ECS and the Research Triangle Student Chapter of ECS.

ORCID poster by jennycham.co.uk

What is ORCID?

ORCID, or Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is an organization that aims to ensure that all scientific works can be appropriately attributed to their authors. By providing members with unique 16-digit persistent digital identifiers (called ORCID identifiers) and maintaining a central registry of members, ORCID is rapidly taking hold in the research community as a means of improving the accuracy of attribution, collaboration, and funding.

Due to the ever-expanding and international nature of scientific literature, the need for a unique identifier has become increasingly apparent. First and last names can be unreliable and inaccurate due to cultural differences in name-order conventions, changing last names due to marriage, or inconsistent use of abbreviations or initials. All of these factors can lead to the unfortunate result of authors being incorrectly credited (or worse, not credited) for their work.

The use of ORCID identifiers actively prevents this potentially damaging mishap, instead allowing journals and institutions to accurately monitor individual authors’ contributions to science.

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February 2015 marked the one year anniversary of ECS’s Author Choice Open Access Program. This has been a year full of exciting changes and challenges for the Society, as well as our authors. ECS is excited to say that, with the help of our authors and editors, we have moved one step closer in our mission to Free the Science™.

In the first full year of the program ECS received over 1,000 open access submissions with CC BY being the favored license (making up close to 60% of papers submitted)!

Open access (OA) submissions came from as many as 44 different countries with top submitters consisting of:

• USA – 33%
• China & Japan – tied at 11%
• South Korea – 8%
• Germany & Canada – tied at 5%

ECS is also pleased to share that 95% of submitted papers were eligible for article credits.

So what are you waiting for? Become an integral part of our mission, help Free the Science, and submit your manuscript as OA today!

The editors of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) are calling for papers for these upcoming focus issues:

JES Focus Issues:

Electrochemical Interfaces in Energy Storage Systems
Submission Deadline: June 1, 2015
Focusing on a better understanding of the mechanism of electronic and ionic transport phenomena across electrode-electrolyte interfaces and solid-state interphases in electrochemical energy storage systems. READ MORE.

Redox Flow Batteries – Reversible Fuel Cells
Submission Deadline: August 1, 2015
Focusing on integration of renewable energy sources, like wind and solar into the electrical grid system and how that poses major challenges due to their variable nature and unpredictable availability. READ MORE.

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“The unique and longer-term part of our OA plan is to “Free the Science™“: to provide all ECS content at no cost to anyone—no fees for authors, readers, and libraries.”

Published in the latest issue of Interface.

The models of scientific communication and publication—which have served us all so well for so long—are no longer fully meeting the spirit of the ECS mission, may not be financially viable, and are hurting the dissemination of the results of scientific research.

The future of Open Access (OA) can change not only scholarly publishing, but can change the nature of scientific communication itself. OA has the power to more “evenly distribute” the advantages currently given to those who can easily access the outputs of scientific research.

ECS has long been concerned with facilitating that access, and our mission has been to disseminate the content from within our technical domain, as broadly as possible, and with as few barriers as possible. To accomplish this, we have maintained a robust, high-quality, high-impact publishing program for over 100 years.

Several years ago, ECS started taking a serious look at the challenges facing us in fulfilling our mission, specifically with respect to our publishing program. The challenges—faced by others in publishing, to a greater or lesser degree—are many and have become increasingly sever.

When a commercial scientific publisher is taking a 35% net profit out of the system, compared with under 2% by ECS, something is not only wrong, but it is clear that some publishers will do anything and everything they can to keep maintaining that level of profit. For many, journal publishing has indeed become a business.

Read the rest.

An article by C. Liu and R.G. Kelly in the latest issue of Interface.

Localized corrosion is characterized by intense dissolution at discrete sites on the surface of a metal or alloy, while the remainder of the surface corrodes at a much lower rate. The ratio of the two rates is on the order of 10. Typical forms of localized corrosion include crevice corrosion, pitting, stress corrosion cracking, and intergranular corrosion. Localized corrosion represents the primary corrosion failure mode for passive/corrosion resistant materials.

There has been extensive experimental characterization of the dependence of the susceptibility to corrosion on alloy and solution composition, temperature, and other variables. Computational modeling can play an important role in improving the understanding of localized corrosion processes, in particular when it is coupled with experimental research that accurately quantifies the important characteristics that control corrosion rate and resultant morphology. There are many modeling methods that can be applied, with the choice of method driven by the goal of the modeling exercise.

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Check out what’s trending in electrochemical and solid state technology! Read some of the most exciting and innovative papers that have been recently published in ECS’s journals.

The articles highlighted below are Open Access! Follow the links to get the full-text version.

“Modeling Volume Change due to Intercalation into Porous Electrodes”
Published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society
Lithium-ion batteries are electrochemical devices whose performance is influenced by transport processes, electrochemical phenomena, mechanical stresses, and structural deformations. Many mathematical models already describe the electrochemical performance of these devices. Some models go further and account for changes in porosity of the composite electrode. Read the rest.

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Co-editor of Interface, Vijay Ramani, talks about open access publishing in this letter from the editor.

The following is an article from the latest issue of Interface by co-editor Vijay Ramani.

Late last year, I accepted the invitation to become co-editor of Interface safe in the knowledge that I would not actually be called upon to do anything for the foreseeable future.* Thanks to the outstanding ECS staff and conscientious guest editors and authors, this happy state of affairs has persisted until now. But just as “even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea,” so it is that the inevitable passage of time has brought upon a situation wherein actual effort is required on my part, viz. this editorial. The increasingly plaintive entreaties from our admirably patient Director of Publications seeking the contents of this column can no longer, in good conscience, be ignored or fobbed off with feeble excuses.

Read the rest.