Mary Yess, ECS Deputy Executive Director & Chief Content Officer, and Logan Streu, ECS Content Associate and Assistant to the CCO, recently came across a great video series that addresses a hot button topic here at ECS: access.

Through our mission to disseminate content to the largest possible audience with as few barriers as possible and our move towards full open access publication, ECS is working to help change the nature of scientific communication itself.

However, sometimes these technical research papers do not tell the important scientific stories that the everyday reader needs to know. For ECS, the Redcat blog was the answer to that issue. For Johns Hopkins University, their series “Science: Out of the Box” focuses on translating complex scientific concepts into understandable and entertaining stories.

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 colors surrounding the Altmetric “donut” reflect the mix of sources contributing to an article’s Altmetric score.

For many years, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), as indexed in Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports (JCR), in the world of academic publishing has been accepted as a near-universal means of measuring the importance of scholarly publications. Despite the widespread use of this traditional bibliometric, the JIF lacks the ability to provide authors and readers information regarding the impact of individual articles.

Starting in December 2014, ECS joined the ranks of many other scholarly publishers supplementing aggregate journal impact data (provided by the JIF) with a type of article level metrics (ALMs) called alternative metrics, or “altmetrics,” as they have come to be known. To provide article-level impact data for its journals, ECS has chosen to use the article level metrics service provided by the company Altmetric.

Article level metrics are a better way for authors to track the discussion and attention surrounding their works. Unlike the JIF, the Altmetric system reports data for articles, from a variety of potential sources. Using these data, Altmetric generates a score for individual articles in near-real-time. These scores are produced using a number of outlets including

• online reference managers (Mendeley, CiteULike);
• mainstream media (newspapers and magazines); and
• social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

The data acquired from these sources are weighted based on the volume of attention, the sources of attention, and the influence or relative importance of the source.

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The development and commercialization of Li-ion batteries in recent decades is without doubt the most important and impressive success of modern electrochemistry.

The Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) is publishing focus issues related to IMLB (International Meeting on Lithium Batteries) beginning with the 2014 meeting. Important to note is that this focus issue is completely Open Access, enabling a much broader audience to read these papers than would have access with a subscription-only issue.

Go to the table of contents now!

Twenty-one papers have here been selected for this focus issue. These papers touch upon many important new aspects in the field and illustrate well the wide spectrum of topics that were discussed at the IMLB 2014 meeting.

The most important international conference event in the Li battery community is the biannual International Meeting on Lithium Batteries; a conference series founded by Bruno Scrosati which began 33 years ago. The IMLB meeting can, in fact, be seen as among the most important conferences related to power sources in general.

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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.

“Comprehensive scientific assessments of our current and potential future climates clearly indicate that climate change is real, largely attributable to emissions from human activities, and potentially a very serious problem.” This is pulled from a public policy statement originally written in 2004 by the American Chemical Society.

Eighteen scientific societies signed on to a similar American Association for the Advancement of Science statement affirming the consensus scientific view on climate change in 2009. According to the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, at least 200 worldwide scientific organizations now formally hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. Recently, the panel released a major report, capping its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is due to human activity. More than 700 of the world’s top climate scientists and 1,729 expert reviewers from more than 70 countries participated in the report process.

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Dutch institutions ‘unbending’ on fee-free demand as talks with Elsevier resume

John Lewis, ECS’ Associate Director of Meetings, spotted an article in Times Higher Education out of the UK last week on open access in the Netherlands — Elsevier’s home court. And yes, we are all a little obsessed with open access here in the office.

In January last year, Sander Dekker, the Dutch minister for education, culture and science, decreed that 60 per cent of Dutch research articles must be open access by 2019 and 100 per cent by 2024. Dutch university presidents responded by agreeing to make their renewal of subscription deals dependent on publishers taking steps to realise this goal.

Well, the current deal expired this month. No one was talking to each other for awhile, now both sides are back at the bargaining table. However, Gerard Meijer, president of Radboud University and one of the lead negotiators for the Dutch universities, insisted that Dutch universities were determined not to bend.

“We are willing to pay publishers for the work they do, but Elsevier’s profit margin is approaching 40 per cent, and universities have to do the [editing] work and pay for it. We aren’t going to accept it any longer. I think from the fact that Elsevier is not willing to move much, they simply still don’t believe it. Well, they got us wrong,” he said.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this.

Read the article.

Toyota is looking to propel the future of the fuel cell vehicle with the recent announcement that they will be granting royalty-free use to thousands of their patents.

“I’m happy and extremely proud to announce to you today that Toyota will grant royalty-free use of all 5,680 of our fuel cell patents, including pending patents,” said Senior Vice President of Toyota’s Automotive Operations, Bob Carter, on January 5 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

The patents are to be used by companies manufacturing and selling fuel cell vehicles. Carter stated that these patents – which are critical to the development and production of fuel cells vehicles – will be available through 2020.

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Imagine a world where anyone—from the student in Atlanta to the researcher in Port au Prince—can freely read the scientific papers they need to make a discovery, where scientific breakthroughs in energy conversion, sensors or nanotechnology are unimpeded by fees to access or publish research.

At ECS, that is our vision of the future. We’re working to provide open access to all ECS publications, while maintaining our high standards of peer-review and fast delivery of content.

Please help us make this vision a reality by
making a tax-deductible donation to ECS today.

Your donation fosters the growth of electrochemistry and solid state science and technology by supporting ECS publications and the participation of scientists from around the world at our biannual meetings.

Through travel grants and reduced fees, ECS enables the participation of young scientists and students who otherwise might not be able to attend an ECS meeting. This is particularly important as the work of these scientists, and all ECS members, increasingly holds the keys to solving global challenges in energy, waste and sustainability.

Please help us continue the important work of ECS by donating today.

Thank you again for your incredible work and continued support.

Photographs of Blaberus discoidalis (A), the transmitter circuit (B) and of a quarter coin (C) to compare the scales involved.

While browsing through the vast array of Open Access articles that ECS hosts in its Digital Library, one title in particular caught our eye here at headquarters.

I mean, it is pretty hard to ignore an academic article titled “Wireless Communication by an Autonomous Self-Powered Cyborg Insect.”

The article, published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society by researchers from Case Western Reserve University (one of the authors is ECS Board of Directors Senior VP Dan Scherson), details – to put it simply – how a cyborg cockroach can generate and transmit signals wirelessly.

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