David Cliffel is the Professor of Chemistry & Department Chair at Vanderbilt University, where he leads research on the electrochemistry and analytical chemistry of nanoparticles and photosynthetic proteins. He has recently become a new Technical Editor for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, concentrating in the Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry, Electrocatalysis, and Photoelectrochemistry Topical Interest Area.

What do you hope to accomplish as the new Technical Editor of JES?
I’d like to improve the connection between what’s happening – as far as vibrant science – at the meetings and have that reflected in the quality of the papers in the journal. I think my role is really to facilitate the extension of the quality of the meetings into the journals.

How important is the peer-review process to the integrity of scientific publications?
Peer-review is the heart of how science gets evaluated and how important discoveries get communicated to the rest of us. The review process is still the best method we have of being able to evaluate the quality and importance of what’s really happening in our field. The reviewers are a critical part, and in JES, the key aspect is that our reviewers are in electrochemistry and that may or may not be the case in any other journal. One of our greatest assets is the quality of our reviewers’ knowledge in electrochemistry.

What kind of impact have you seen open access have on academic publishing?
Open access really has expanded the rest of the world’s ability to access high-quality journals. It’s also opened up technical papers to a larger part of the scientific audience and expanded what the audience is reading. That has been a very exciting thing. My open access papers are getting read by high school students and I’m getting emails from high school teachers about what’s the new paper that just came out in an area they happen to be searching in. Open access drives scientific knowledge and the spread of scientific knowledge to people who never had access before.

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The last week of October is International Open Access Week. As ECS did last year, we are celebrating by giving the world a preview of what complete open access will look like when we have completed our Free the Science campaign. From October 24th through October 30th we are taking down the paywall to the ECS Digital Library. Over 132,000 articles will be freely available to anyone who wants to read them.

We had great success with this last year. During Open Access Week the Journal of The Electrochemical Society saw a 51% increase in usage.

Please spread the word. From October 24th through the 30th anyone will be able to read any of the content in our digital library for free.  We hope to make this the “norm” in the future through our Free the Science initiative.

The Electrochemical Society is pleased to announce, as part of the on-going ECS Monograph Series, the publication of two new editions of ECS monographs, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Please join ECS in welcoming authors Christofer Leygraf, Mark Orazem, and Bernard Tribollet, as they sign copies of their monographs on Wednesday, October 5, 2016, 1830h in Hall 2, HCC, followed by a short Q+A session and book raffle! Two copies of each of the below monographs will be raffled off (must be present during the book signing to win)! Drop your business cards off at the ECS Publications booth any time during Registration hours in order to enter to win a copy of these monographs!

Atmospheric Corrosion, Second Edition, by Christofer Leygraf, Inger Odnevall Wallinder, Johan Tidblad, and Thomas Graedel

Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy, Second Edition, by Mark Orazem and Bernard Tribollet

Questions? Please contact bethanne.stuebe@electrochem.org 

This Collection’s digitization was made possible by a generous grant from the Army Research Office and is fully free online for digital download.

Seventeen new issues of ECS Transactions have just been published for the PRiME ECS Meeting.

The papers in these issues of ECST will be presented in Honolulu, Hawaii October 2 to October 7, 2016. ECST Volume 75, Issues 1 to 17 can be found here.

New for 2016: these issues of ECST can also be purchased in the NEW ECS ONLINE STORE as full-text digital downloads. You can also purchase these issues as a CD/USB combo in the online store. Please search for ECST issues from the PRiME meeting in the ECS online store here.

While at the ECS Meeting in Hawaii, please stop by the ECS Publications Booth. There, you can purchase additional CD/USB copies of the PRiME issues and get additional information on all ECS Publications. The ECS Publications booth is located in the Honolulu Convention Center, Hall 2 and is open during all Registration hours.

At ECS, we offer your institution a subscription to ECS Plus, which gives your researchers access to a wealth of high-ranking, highly-cited research in electrochemistry and solid state science.

With ECS Plus, authors can publish an unlimited number of articles in our high-ranking journals (Journal of The Electrochemical Society and ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology) as Open Access, at no additional cost to them or your institution.

Please don’t hesitate to email Anna Olsen, Senior Content Associate and Library Liaison, with any questions you may have, or with your order!

Exciting news for PRiME 2016: Stop by the ECS Publication Booth for a chance to win 1 of 5 Open Access Credits! These credits may be used to publish your paper as OA in either JES or JSS.

Please stop by the ECS Publications Booth, located in the Honolulu Convention Center, Hall 2 Foyer, any time during Registration Hours and drop off your business card to enter the raffle. ECS will be raffling off 5 Open Access credits during the PRiME meeting (each credit is worth $800)!

Questions? Please email oa@electrochem.org and we’ll see you in Honolulu!

Lithium-air batteries are viewed by many as a potential next-generation technology in energy storage. With the highest theoretical energy density of all battery devices, Li-air could revolutionize everything from electric vehicles to large-scale grid storage. However, the relatively young technology has a few barriers to overcome before it can be applied. A new study published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) is taking a fundamental step forward in advancing Li-air through the development of mixed metal catalyst that could lead to more efficient electrode reactions in the battery.

The paper, entitled “In Situ Formed Layered-Layered Metal Oxide as Bifunctional Catalyst for Li-Air Batteries,” details a cathode catalyst composed of three transition metals (manganese, nickel, and cobalt), which can create the right oxidation state during the battery cycling to enable both the catalysis of the charge and the discharge reaction.

Future opportunities

According to K.M. Abraham, co-author of the paper, the manganese allows for the catalysis of the oxygen reduction reaction while the cobalt catalyzes the charge reaction of the battery.

“This offers opportunities for future research to develop similar materials to optimize the catalysis of the Li-air battery using one material that will combine the functions of these mixed metal oxides,” Abraham says.

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Scholarly publishing news has been buzzing about 1science’s recently published large-scale study on the impact of Open Access. This study analyzed more than 3 million papers and found that Open Access papers have a 50% greater citation advantage than papers in subscription-based journals.

Meanwhile, ECS has also been performing its own (much smaller-scale) research to confirm this hypothesis. In May 2015, ECS launched a study, led by Daniela Solomon, a librarian at Case Western Reserve University, to examine the citation advantage for Open Access articles published in Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES).

The study looks at both downloads and citations of articles published in a single volume of JES. This brief note outlines the results at the end of one year; however, we consider these results preliminary as we will continue to run the study for another year.

We will publish our findings again when the study closes: in the meantime we’d be interested in hearing your comments and thoughts on our findings so far.

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Children struggle to learn when they don’t have science labs and libraries. Learning becomes difficult in classrooms that are falling apart, or where children are expected to sit on the floor because they have neither desks nor chairs.

A lack of infrastructure is just one contributor to South Africa’s entrenched and ongoing educational inequality. There is another, less frequently discussed issue that is deepening this inequality: access to quality peer-reviewed information.

Such information should be available to all South Africans whether they are school children, university students, researchers or citizen scientists. This will encourage lifelong self-learning. It will spur continued research and innovation. Access to information can bolster education, training, empowerment and human development.

International Open Access Week offers a good opportunity to explore how South Africa can improve its citizens’ access to information.

Opening up access

It has been more than 21 years since apartheid ended, but a distinction remains between South Africa’s “rich” and “poor” universities. One of the reasons for this distinction is the richer institutions’ ability to invest in research resources. They can afford expensive subscriptions to databases which contain a wealth of research – ironically funded by taxpayers’ money.

The historically disadvantaged and predominantly black universities can’t afford such subscriptions. Their academics also can’t contribute to such resources, because authors are expected to pay a fee for the “privilege” of being published.

As university budgets are slashed, even wealthier institutions are beginning to struggle with subscription and publication fee costs.

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