Q&A series with ECS OpenCon 2017 speakers

Dan Schwartz, Boeing-Sutter Professor and director of the Clean Energy Institute at the University of Washington

ECS will be hosting its first ever OpenCon event on October 1 in National Harbor, MD. OpenCon will be ECS’s first, large community event aimed at creating a culture of change in how research is designed, shared, discussed, and disseminated, with the ultimate goal of making scientific progress faster.

During ECS’s Open Con, Dan Schwartz, director of the Clean Energy Institute at the University of Washington, will give a talk on the open science movement and academia. In addition to speaking at OpenCon, Schwartz will also co-organize the ECS Data Sciences Hack Day.

The following conversation is part of a series with speakers from the upcoming ECS OpenCon. Read the rest of the series.

ECS: When we say “data sciences,” what does this encompass?

Dan Schwartz: “Data science” is shorthand for the scientific and engineering principles that underpin efficient creation, visualization, analysis, and sharing of data. I have a conjecture—unevaluated but euphemistically called “Schwartz’s law” around here—that every PhD I graduate produce more data than the sum of all prior PhDs. Basically, each year cameras and detectors have deeper bit depth, equipment and software get more automated, more of the software tools allow data and simulation to be animated, etc. In short, both experimentalists and simulation people are seeing huge growth in data they need to analyze, visualize, and share with collaborators.

ECS: Specifically, what areas of electrochemistry and/or solid state science can most benefit from the various components of data sciences, such as open data, open source software and cloud-based computing tools, etc.?

DS: I believe we can accelerate progress and improve reproducibility of all ECS science and technology through open data, open software, and access to shared computational resources. A critical part of this is building the ECS community that establishes standards for data repositories, creates, peer evaluates, and improves software tools.

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Since its launch in 2016, ECS Plus has flourished into a widespread movement. At its forefront are leading, forward-thinking institutions that recognize the value of incentivizing open access publishing on an individual, institutional, and global scale.

ECS Plus offers institutions a competitively priced subscription package that grants access to all of the content in the ECS Digital Library, including our top-ranking, authoritative, peer-reviewed journal content, as well as free and unlimited open access publishing for affiliated authors.

Immediately following its January 2016 launch, ECS Plus acquired the National Science and Technology Library of China—a consortium then consisting of just under 800 institutions—as a subscriber. Over the subsequent months, ECS Plus saw a steady rise in subscriber count, reflecting a desire shared among institutions worldwide to make open access publishing a viable option for authors.

If data trends serve as any indication, this desire holds fast. In recent months, ECS Plus gained two new subscribers: Arizona State University and the University of Michigan. Just last month, the National Science and Technology Library of China increased its ECS Plus subscriber count from 907 to 924. The University of South Carolina recently confirmed an ECS Plus subscription for 2018.

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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.

S.V. Babu courtesy of Clarkson University

ECS recently announced the reappointment of S.V. Babu, Distinguished University Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Clarkson University’s Wallace H. Coulter School of Engineering, to its Editorial Advisory Committee (EAC).

The EAC expedites and facilitates evaluation and publication decisions of manuscripts submitted to ECS journals. In this role, experts like Prof. Babu, provide support to the journal editors in areas where existing technical editors and associate editors may need additional assistance. Committee members are available for a rapid review and additional opinions to supplement conflicting or imbalanced comments from other reviewers; processing assistance in the journal areas that receive a large number of annual submissions; and reviewing and expediting articles that go in the Society’s other communications media.

Babu is the past director of Clarkson’s Center for Advanced Materials Processing and an expert in the field of chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP), holding 31 patents. He has supervised 44 PhD and 38 MS students and is a co-author of more than 250 professional publications, including 198 peer-reviewed publications. He has organized and co-organized many conferences and symposiums, as well as served as keynote speaker numerous times. He has been named twice with the IBM Faculty Award (2004 and 2016), and acknowledgement of his contributions to education and research from Intel, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the World Education Congress among other external recognition.

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ECS Transactions 77(11) “Selected Proceedings from the 231st ECS Meeting: New Orleans, LA – Spring 2017,” has just been published.

This issue contains papers from the following symposia:

A01 – Battery and Energy Technology Joint General Session

A02 – Large-Scale Energy Storage 8

A04 – Battery Safety

A05 – Lithium-Ion Batteries and Beyond

A06 – Battery Student Slam 1

B01 – Carbon Nanostructures for Energy Conversion

B02 – Carbon Nanostructures in Medicine and Biology

B04 – Endofullerenes and Carbon Nanocapsules

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Image: CC0 Public Domain

A recently published article in The Scientist tells a growingly familiar tale in scholarly publishing: predatory publishers taking advantage of, and often times profiting from, researchers across the globe.

The term “predatory publishers” was coined by University of Colorado Denver librarian, Jeffrey Beall, nearly a decade ago. These publishers disseminate plagiarized or poorly reviewed content, taking advantage of a pay-to-publish open access system by charging authors high prices to disseminate their content while all but eliminating the peer review process. In the case of the article published in The Scientist, these predatory journals even trick established researchers to agree to have their names listed on editorial boards, falsley presenting themselves as credible start-up journals. While this may bolster a journal’s credibility at first glance, it often doesn’t go beyond a name listed on a website, with little to no communication from the journal to the editors.

(RELATED: “For-science or For-profit?”)

And if predatory publishers can’t trick honest researchers, that publisher may just recruit a fake editor. A recent investigation, spearheaded by Nature, found that dozens of academic journals have been recruiting fake editors and offering them a place on their editorial board.

According to reports from the Hanken School of Economics, predatory journals increased their publication volume from 53,000 to 420,000 articles per year between 2010 and 2014. Taking article processing charges into account, the report estimates that all-in-all, the predatory publishing market was worth at $74 million in 2014.

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The journal impact factors (JIFs) for 2016 have been released, and ECS is pleased to announce that the JIFs for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) have both risen by 8%.

The JIFs, published in the Journal of Citation Reports (formerly published by Thomson Reuters, now called Clarivate Analytics), are a long-established metric intended to evaluate the relevancy and importance of journals. A journal’s JIF is equivalent to the average number of times its articles were cited over the course of the prior two years.

From 2015 to 2016, the JIF of JES increased from 3.014 to 3.259, and the JIF of JSS climbed from 1.650 to 1.787. These increases mark a continuing trend of growth for both journals.

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Brett Lucht is a professor of chemistry at the University of Rhode Island, where his research focuses on organic materials chemistry. Lucht’s research includes the development of novel electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries and other efforts to improve the performance of electrolytes for electric vehicles. Lucht has recently been named associate editor for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society.

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

Brett Lucht: I hope to improve the prestige of the journal. While the Journal of The Electrochemical Society is the oldest journal of electrochemical science, competition from other journals has become fierce.  The Electrochemical Society is the largest scientific organization focused on electrochemistry and ECS meetings are very well attended. Thus publishing electrochemical research in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society should be the most prestigious place to publish.

ECS: Why should authors publish in ECS journals?

BL: The Journal of The Electrochemical Society has been in continuous production since 1902—115 years. While many new journals come and go, they are frequently focused on narrow topics which fluctuate in importance.  Publications in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society will last the test of time.  In my area of research, lithium-ion batteries, many new journals are publishing research in this area. However, many of the fundamental research articles providing the foundation for this field were published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society.

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ECS believes that the key to sustainability is the ability to adapt. For over 115 years, ECS has been committed to publishing high quality, peer-reviewed research at the cutting edge of innovation.

But the demands of the research arena are always changing. As the scientific community develops new needs out in the field, so must ECS—as a leading nonprofit publisher—develop new avenues and more inclusive platforms for publication and dissemination.

To best accommodate the needs of contemporary scientific research, ECS’s journals, the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology, are open to article submission types beyond that of the standard-issue research paper. As of 2017, ECS accepts journal submissions of five different types.

Whether you’re an author, an editor, or a reader of ECS publications, it’s beneficial to be familiar with the five ECS journal article types.

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