With our 228^th meeting in Phoenix just completed, ECS is calling for abstract submissions for our 229^th meeting in San Diego, California. By submitting an abstract, you have the opportunity to present a paper or participate in a poster session and are eligible to apply for a division-sponsored travel grant. Travel grants are intended is to assist students, postdoctoral researchers, and young professionals with the travel costs of attending an ECS biannual meeting. These grants are specific to each division.

How to submit an abstract:

To submit your abstract for the 229^th meeting in San Diego, please visit here.

The deadline for submitting an abstract is DECEMBER 11, 2015.

How to apply for a travel grant:

Apply for a travel grant after submitting your abstract by visiting www.electrochem.org/travel_grants.

The deadline for travel grant submissions for the San Diego meeting is FEBRUARY 12, 2016. 

If you have any additional questions please contact travelgrant@electrochem.org.

Poster session winners Andrew Akbashev, Axel Gambou-Bosca, Andrew Durney

How to enter the General Poster Session:

Students are eligible for the biannual meeting general student poster awards by submitting their abstract to the Z01- General Society Student Poster Session. To submit your abstract for the San Diego meeting, please visit https://ecs.confex.com/ecs/229/cfp.cgi and then scroll to the “Z-General Topics” section.

Image Credit: Danny Kingsley & Sarah Brown

For well over a year now, ECS has been actively pursuing its mission to Free the Science™ with our Author Choice Open Access program. We have seen amazing uptake, and we would like to take a moment to thank these authors for their valuable contributions to both our journals and our mission.

We would also like to take a moment to encourage those who have yet to publish OA to do so—after all, it is Open Access Week!

Publishing OA helps authors, researchers, and the society at large (not that there isn’t some overlap between those categories) – here’s how: (more…)

Read the 21 papers in the collection.

From Doron Aurbach, Technical Editor, Batteries and Energy Storage:

The field of advanced batteries is highly dynamic and important. The development and commercialization of Li ion batteries can be considered one of the most important successes of modern electrochemistry.

This battery technology is now challenged to power electric vehicles. The requirements of high-energy-density drive intensive work on novel battery systems, beyond Li ion technology (Li-sulfur, metal-oxygen batteries and more).

We are proud and happy to publish a special collection of papers on advanced batteries and related research efforts.

Twenty-one experts in the field were asked to submit review/opinion papers on topics related to advanced battery research, based on their experience. We believe that this collection of papers provides our readership an important update and guidelines for further studies and development work.

Read the 21 papers in the collection.

ECS just published its first Communication article in JES entitled “Communication—In Situ Formation of Anticorrosive Mg (OH)₂/Carbon Composite Film on Magnesium Alloy by Absorbic Acid-Assisted Hydrothermal Process.”

The authors are Takahiro Ishizaki, Naosumi Kamiyama, Erina Yamamoto, Sou Kumagai, Tomohito Sudare (all from Shibaura Institute in Tokyo, Japan), and Nagahiro Saito (Nagoya University).

Communications is a special category of short article for publication in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) or ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS). Communication articles are brief articles or reports that describe impactful research wherein dissemination prior to a full complete study/paper will substantially benefit the electrochemical or solid state community.

This article will be free in the ECS Digital Library for a limited time.

ECS is celebrating Open Access Week this year by making all the content—over 120,000 articles—in the ECS Digital Library freely accessible from October 19 through 25, 2015.

The ECS Digital Library is home to the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, the flagship journal of ECS, published continuously since 1902, and to the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology, ECS Electrochemistry Letters, ECS Solid State Letters, Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters, ECS Transactions, ECS Meeting Abstracts, and Interface.

We have been increasing the number of articles we publish as open access at no cost to the author for almost two years now, but we wanted to take the opportunity of Open Access Week to show the world our vision: all of our content freely available to anyone who wants to read it.

The research in these journals directly addresses the sustainability of our planet. Our scientists are looking to solve some of the most pressing problems the world is facing today:

• energy storage and conversion, from small-scale to large scale: batteries, fuel cells, biofuels, supercapacitors, grid-scaling;

• environmental remediation of materials used in research;

• corrosion of infrastructures;

• clean water and sanitation;

• the growth of nanotechnology;

• processes to develop safer and more effective drugs;

• improving and developing new medical devices; and

• sensors for environmental cleanup, emissions monitoring, detection of illegal and dangerous materials, home and workplace safety, and medical diagnosis and care.

ECS believes that open access—especially in electrochemistry and solid state science—is an important goal for scientific and technological development and, quite simply, creating a better world.

Ensuring that everyone working on these issues—wherever they are in the world, and for whomever they work—has access to the latest research is in our best interests as a nonprofit professional society supporting researchers everywhere, and in the best interests of all the sciences.

ECS has not yet reached a place where it can sustainably make all of its publications open access, but it is our goal and we want to celebrate our vision of the future during Open Access Week.

Take advantage of the free content in the ECS Digital Library October 19 through 25, 2015.

With the largest digital collection of electrochemistry and solid state related proceedings, ECST has published 850+ issues and over 18,000 articles since its launch in 2005.

New issues of ECS Transactions have now been published from the upcoming 228th ECS Meeting in Phoenix, to be held October 11-16, 2015. 

Seventeen “enhanced” issues of ECST are now available. They will also be for sale at ECS Central at the meeting next to Registration.

As always, issues of ECST are continuously updated, and all full-text papers will be published here as soon as they are available. Get currently published issues of ECST. To be notified of newly published articles or volumes, please subscribe to the ECST RSS feed.

Peer Review Week is still going strong, with publishers and reviewers across the globe chiming in with astute articles and intelligent commentary. Here at ECS, we’ve gotten insight from one of our associate editors, looked at how the peer review process works, and examined how it has become the heart of scholarly publication.

Now we’d like to take a moment to thank our reviewers, who use their technical expertise to help us maintain high-quality publication standards in all four of our peer reviewed journals. Take a look at these tips for peer reviewers.

Scott Lillard is currently the Professor & Carboline Endowed Chair in Corrosion at the University of Akron, where he leads academic research and is and major contributor to the establishment the university’s new Corrosion Engineering program. He has recently been appointed to the ECS Electrochemical Science & Technology (EST) Editorial Board as an Associate Editor for a two-year term beginning July 1, concentrating in the Corrosion Science and Technology Technical Interest Area.

What do you hope to accomplish in your new role as the EST Editorial Board Associate Editor?
I have some experience working on the board of some other journals, but I don’t think that’s what I really contribute. What I contribute is this idea of customer service. There are a number of reasons why people publish in the journal. It might be the appropriateness of the content or the impact factor, but the third reason is probably customer service. What does that mean? That means getting good peer reviews in a timely manner and treating the authors in a professional manner.

How do you think peer reviewed journals have changed over the years?
I think the goals of authors are the same as they were 20 years ago. They want to get their publication out to people in their field so they can read it. They want to do that in as timely a manner as possible. The way in which the process is expected to occur is much different now than it was 20 years ago. It would take you six or nine months to get reviews back. That’s just not expected anymore. Everything is expected to be much more efficient now. I think efficiency, speed, and customer service are the things that are changing.

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Image: CC0 Public Domain

September 28-October 2, 2015 is the first Peer Review Week, and it’s a good a time to put a spotlight on good practice in peer review and celebrate all it brings to the scholarly communication process. At ECS, we are marking Peer Review Week with a look at how peer review works here, and what happens to your manuscript after you submit it.

Our authors already know that the preparation and submission of a scientific manuscript for peer review can be a lengthy process, involving not just the research work and writing of the paper, but also the collection of supporting pieces of information required to enable publication.

But what happens after you hit the “Submit” button?

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This week (September 28-October 2, 2015) marks the first-ever Peer Review Week, a community-driven movement to discuss and celebrate the peer review process. Peer Review Week serves as a forum to take a deeper look at the heart of scholarly communications.

Peer review is not only critical for assuring high-quality science is published, it is also a crucial part of how society perceives published science and how reputable it is to the world at large.

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