This week (September 28-October 2, 2015) marks the first-ever Peer Review Week, a community-driven movement to discuss and celebrate the peer review process. Peer Review Week serves as a forum to take a deeper look at the heart of scholarly communications.
Peer review is not only critical for assuring high-quality science is published, it is also a crucial part of how society perceives published science and how reputable it is to the world at large.
ECS publishes special or “focus” issues in order to highlight scientific and technological areas of current interest and future promise that are expanding rapidly or have taken a new direction.
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:
Defect Characterization in Semiconductor Materials and Devices
Submission Deadline: October 21, 2015
In recent years, a rapidly growing interest and concern have developed within the microelectronics industry and research community with respect to defect characterization in hetero-epitaxial layers and nano-structures for CMOS and photonic applications. Read more.
Honoring Allen J. Bard
Submission Deadline: September 30, 2015
ECS welcomes original research contributions to a special issue of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society honoring Allen J. Bard. Prof. Bard has been a pioneer of modern electrochemistry for over 60 years and a long-standing member of the Society. For his 80th birthday, The Electrochemical Society founded the Allen J. Bard Award in 2013 to honor his extensive contributions to the field of electrochemistry; the first award was given in May 2015. Read more.
Logan Streu, ECS Content Associate & Assistant to the CCO, recently came across a video from The Scholarly Kitchen explaining how ORCID works (with dolls as visual aids).
Learn more about ORCID! Check out Logan’s articles on the benefits of ORCID identifiers:
Find out more about signing-up for ORCID!
![As title length increases, the number of citations typically decreases. [Click to enlarge]](https://www.electrochem.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/title-vs-popularity.jpg)
As title length increases, the number of citations typically decreases.
[Click to enlarge]
A new analysis of 140,000 scientific papers has recently been released, suggesting that studies with shorter titles are more often cited than those with long titles. The reason? Papers with shorter titles may be generally more concise and easier to comprehend.
The analysis began by looking at 20,000 of the most highly cited scientific papers published from 2007 to 2010. Each year consistently showed that papers with shorter titles received more attention.
This from Popular Science:
The situation gets more complicated, though, when you take journal rankings into account. Papers published in more prestigious journals tend to get more citations. Once the authors controlled for that factor, the correlation between shorter titles and higher citations only held up for the years 2007 to 2010. But the results do show that, overall, journals that publish papers with shorter titles tend to receive more citations per paper.
Logan Streu, ECS Content Associate & Assistant to the CCO, recently came across a video that takes a close (albeit funny) look at the misleading or misused words frequently used in scientific research.
Is “scientific proof” an oxymoron? Is there really a gene for everything? Check out the video below to see some of the phrases that are often misused.
Want more science videos? Check out our YouTube channel!
Call for PapersElectrochemical Interfaces in Energy Storage Systems
Submission Deadline | June 20, 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. Learn more.
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.
With U.S. healthcare costs of juvenile diabetes approaching $14.9 billion annually due to the upwards of 3 million Americans affected by this type of diabetes, researchers and scientist are looking for more affordable and effective ways to diagnose and treat. Now, researchers from Oregon State University believe they have found that answer.
A paper recently published in ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) entitled, “Fabrication of a Flexible Amperometric Glucose Sensor Using Additive Processes”, details a novel development in sensor technology to create an improved type of glucose sensor for those with juvenile diabetes. The researchers state that this new technology cold provide a more cost effective and comfortable sensor with better efficiency.
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:
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.
“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.
