Stephen Maldonado is an associate professor at the University of Michigan, where he leads a research group that focuses on the study of heterogeneous charge transfer processes relevant to the fields of electronics, chemical sensing, and energy conversion/storage technologies. He was recently reappointed as an associate editor for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) in the area of physical and analytical electrochemistry, electrocatalysis, and photoelectrochemistry.

ECS: When did you become an ECS associate editor? What made you pursue an editorial role at ECS?

Stephen Maldonado: I started my time as an ECS associate editor in 2014. I pursued the opportunity for two different reasons. The minor reason was that I was genuinely curious about the “sausage making” process of accepting/rejecting a paper. That is, as an author, I had prepared and submitted plenty of papers but I had little idea about the other side of it. I had reviewed plenty of papers, too, but how those reviews factored into the final fate of the submission was a mystery.

The major reason, though, is that electrochemistry has been a principal aspect of my adult life. I got into science because, at a fundamental level, I thought electrochemistry was cool. Accordingly, my interests were aligned with the ECS at the start and it has been a major influence on my professional development. After getting tenure, I felt the time was right to give back to this community. So when I was asked to consider the position, I jumped at the chance.

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Submit your manuscripts to the Journal of The Electrochemical Society Focus Issue on Ubiquitous Sensors and Systems for IoT by December 26, 2017.

Ubiquitous sensors are becoming an integral part of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and progress in this domain can be seen each month. The promise is that everyone and everything will be connected via wireless data collection, and services like healthcare will be brought to everyone, everywhere, anytime, for virtually any need.

These devices sense the environment and provide applications in home automation, home safety and comfort, and personal health. At a macro level, they provide data for smart cities, smart agriculture, water conservation, energy efficiency industry 4.0, and Society 5.0. Other applications include supply chain management, transportation, and logistics.

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Minhua Shao is an associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he leads a research group pursuing work in advanced material and electrochemical energy technologies. Shao’s current work focuses on electrocatalysis, fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries, lithium-air batteries, CO₂ reduction, and water splitting. Shao was recently named an associate editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society in the area of fuel cells, electrolyzers, and energy conversion.

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

Minhua Shao: As an associate editor, I hope to accelerate the manuscript handling process by identifying suitable reviewers and making fair decisions. I also hope to promote the journal at conferences and among peers, attracting high-quality manuscripts.

ECS: How has scholarly publishing evolved throughout your career?

MS: Scholarly publishing has changed significantly in the past two decades. Now researchers have many more choices on which journals to publish their results. The adoption of the so-called impact factor in assessing the quality of journals/papers has misled the scientific community. More seriously, there is a trend that scholarly publishing is more of a business than a platform for sharing research results.

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Over the summer, librarians and academic leaders in Germany came together to lead a push in taking down the paywalls that block access to so many scientific research articles. The initiative, named Projekt DEAL, represents a bold push toward open access that could change the landscape of academic publishing.

The latest developments in Projekt DEAL pick up on a battle now over two years in the making, where libraries and universities in Germany have united in pushing large publishers to adopt a new business model. The institutions are looking to forego the typical subscription-based academic publishing business model in lieu of paying an annual lump sum that covers publications costs of all papers whose first authors are associated with German institutions.

The concept behind Projekt DEAL is relatively straight forward: multiply the number of papers with first authors associated with German institutions by a reasonable fee per paper. The institutions would pay that amount and those papers would then be published open access, available to everyone around the world, in exchange for free access to all of the publisher’s online content for the German institutions. This would not only mark a huge step in the open access movement, but would alleviate some of the financial burden facing libraries paying for high-cost journal subscriptions.

But this push isn’t the first of its kind. According to reports from Science, institutions from the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, and United Kingdom have all worked for similar agreements. The results, however, have been less than the libraries and universities had hoped for.

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The Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) Focus Issue on Oxygen Reduction and Evolution Reactions for High Temperature Energy Conversion and Storage is now complete, with 16 open access papers published in the ECS Digital Library.

“In this new and exciting era of distributed electricity generation, the modularity (sub-kW to 100 kW systems) with minimal efficiency loss at small scales makes solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) an exciting energy conversion technology,” the authors say in the focus issue’s preface. “This focus issue presents some of the latest research in understanding fundamental mechanisms of ORR and OER, and highlights new materials and concepts to achieve both greater performance and long-term durability.”

Read the full JES Focus Issue on Oxygen Reduction and Evolution Reactions for High Temperature Energy Conversion and Storage.

ECS would like to thank JES technical editor Tom Fuller and this focus issue’s guest editors Sean Bishop, Ainara Aguadero, and Xingbo Liu.

By: Laura Villano, Publications Intern

Laura Villano, Publications Intern (Click to enlarge.)

The purpose of an internship is to benefit both the student and organization. For that reason, I believe my internship at ECS was a success. I gained valuable experience, new skill sets, and many new acquaintances, as well as benefitted the Society. My name is Laura Villano and I am a senior marketing major at The College of New Jersey. During my time at ECS, I worked as an intern for Beth Craanen in the publications department. When I first applied, I was thrilled by the idea of working for a nonprofit and trying to make a difference. The more I learned about ECS and its Free the Science campaign, the more I found myself bragging to my family and friends about the company I interned for.

During my time in the publications department, I performed many marketing duties for ECS’s various publications. The beginning of my internship focused mostly on writing-based projects. I created blog posts and emails regarding subscriptions, journal focus issues, author information sessions, and several other various mini-marketing campaigns. The scope of my internship changed over my six months at ECS, and those duties slowly transformed into more digital advertising and graphic design projects. I transitioned into creating digital advertisements such as banner and carousel ads for the ECS website. I also created flyers about the content in the ECS Digital Library and subscription packages. If you are a member of ECS and attended the New Orleans meeting, you may have also seen some of the larger signage I created!

One of my favorite projects at ECS was helping to redesign the ECS Transactions logo and cover. Unfortunately, I had to leave the internship before the project was carried out but I am excited to see the final product in the future. I thoroughly enjoyed working on the projects with all of the ECS staff. Everyone was friendly and always willing to help.

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The Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) Focus Issue on Mathematical Modeling of Electrochemical Systems at Multiple Scales in Honor of John Newman is now available online, with 72 open access papers published in the ECS Digital Library.

“This focus issue of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society is devoted to the mathematical modeling of electrochemical systems across multiple scales,” the authors say in the focus issue’s preface. “It is dedicated to the work of Professor John Newman from UC Berkeley, who helped establish the field of modeling of electrochemical systems, and is aligned with a previous focus issue and regular symposium on multiscale modeling for electrochemical systems at ECS biannual meetings.”

Newman is a renowned battery researcher and developer of “The Newman Method” — a sophisticated approach to mathematically analyzing complex electrochemical problems. He clarified the physicochemical laws that govern the behavior of electrochemical systems and demonstrated how to use these laws to correctly formulate and solve problems associated with batteries, fuel cells, electrolyzers, and related technologies. He is the author of the book Electrochemical Systems.

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A debate held at the annual Charleston Library Conference tackles the journal impact factor, with speakers looking at the metric and analyzing if it does more harm than good. The debate was moderated by Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication; and argued by Sara Rouhi, director of business development at Altmetric; and Ann Beynonn, manager at Clarivate Analytics.

A journal’s impact factor is a long-established metric intended to evaluate the relevancy of a publication by factoring the average number of times its articles were cited over the course of the prior two years. However, the metric does not reflect journals that continue to have impact long after the two year time-span.

Opening polls of the debate showed that 54 percent of all respondents believed that the impact factor does more harm than good. By the end of the debate, that number had grown to 57 percent. However, because the debate garnered a small number of attendees, the vote does not represent a true statistical significance.

Read full transcripts here.

The Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) Focus Issue on Progress in Molten Salts and Ionic Liquids is now closed, with 51 papers available in the ECS Digital Library. All papers are open access.

In the issue’s preface, authors Robert Mantz, Hugh De Long, Luke Haverhals, and Paul Trulove state, “The objective of this focus issue is to expose the broader community to the research going on in the area of molten salts and ionic liquids beyond that which is presented in the symposium that is organized every two years by ECS. Hopefully these examples of research being pursued will result in the possibility of additional collaborations with the community at large.”

For over 40 years, research related to molten salts and ionic liquids has found a home with ECS. Over the course of those years, interest in the area has expanded, leading unique applications in energy, sensors, rare earth and nuclear chemistry, electrodeposition, reactions, and solute and solvent properties.

Read the JES Focus Issue on Progress in Molten Salts and Ionic Liquids to learn more about the fundamental and applied research happening in the field.

PS: Access 14 original Proceedings Volumes in our Molten Salts Collection.