Business & Education News - September 8, 2004

Electronically yours, ES&T

Thomas Edison would be proud. Beginning on January 1, 2005, ES&T will process only electronic submissions for technical articles. Eighty percent of the manuscripts are already submitted electronically, and elimination of the dual system—paper and digital—will save considerable time for editorial assistants and the publications department. We hope that Web submission (pubs.acs.org/paragon) does not present a problem for you, but if it does, please let us know and we will work with you. Another recent change, suggested by many, is the inclusion of titles in references lists.

The journal is growing by leaps and bounds. In 2003, we received about 2040 manuscripts and published 831. The number of submissions is growing by 15% per year or more. But the page budget, the number of pages that we can afford to print, is growing by only a few percent per year. Thus, the acceptance ratio (the number of manuscripts accepted divided by the total number submitted) has declined in recent years from approximately 0.5 to 0.4. We recognize the stress that this causes, but we hope that we are providing a high-quality journal with research and feature articles that are both novel and significant to the field.

Happily, our impact factor increased this past year to 3.6, and our editors have a goal to shepherd it higher still. We enjoy the highest impact factor in the fields of both environmental sciences and environmental engineering (of journals publishing more than 100 articles annually). So papers published in ES&T are being cited.

In the vernacular of the publishing industry, ES&T is a “hot” journal, meaning that its contents are important to scientists and news magazines alike. It is a “special” publication, meaning that we publish both a magazine section and technical articles. This past year, we began to publish A-pages (magazine pages) in every issue to make the journal more consistent in its appearance and more interesting in its content. The news value of both sections of the journal has improved as evidenced by increasing citations of ES&T research in The New York Times, Science, Nature, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and their peers.

We must have “arrived”, because National Public Radio (NPR) satirized a recent ES&T research article on “flame-retardant” salmon contaminated with polybrominated diphenyl ethers. Reporters don’t wait for the print version of the journal—they work solely with the online version, and you may wish to do the same to get your articles ASAP, about two weeks in advance of print publication. (You can even read my editorials in advance on our online news page!) Our online journal is much improved and is receiving more hits every year.

More than 50% of our articles are written by authors from a country other than the United States, and many articles involve collaborations among scientists from multiple countries. We applaud this internationalization of the journal because it encourages a broader, more diverse pool of contributing scholars. In addition, we are expanding our coverage of international environmental stories in this increasingly globalized world. Everyone is downwind from somebody else.

We have increased the journal’s emphasis on sustainability, policy issues, and environmental microbiology. Special issues are on the horizon for ecotoxicology (December 1) and environmental nanotechnology (spring 2005). Environmental chemistry and associated technologies will always remain our core strength, but we seek to encompass the most recent advances in the analysis and improvement of the environment, including molecular biology and all the “-omics” disciplines.

ES&T boasts a distinguished group of Associate Editors who handle your papers.

Please think of ES&T as your journal—the one where you send the very best manuscripts. We will make every effort to provide a quality publication and to review your papers as rapidly as possible. We want to improve. I welcome your advice at the address below.

Jerald L. Schnoor
Editor
est@uiowa.edu