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.

(more…)

There is a wealth of knowledge that exists in the huge array of academic articles that are being produced. Still, the discovery process and dissemination of knowledge is not as fast as it potentially could be.

The issue lies in the paywalls. In order to read the huge majority of these articles, one would need to have university access or else pay the often substantial fee.

Martin Paul Eve, a lecturer at the University of Lincoln’s School of English & Journalism in the United Kingdom, sat down with The Atlantic recently to discuss this issue that he has delved into in his book entitled Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future.

Here at The Electrochemical Society, we are beginning our bold move toward open access publication in order to speed up and make more efficient the dissemination of scientific research. Still, the issue of paywalls in academic research exists and often time impedes on progress.

(more…)

Here at The Electrochemical Society, we give a crap about sanitation. With our recent partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which awarded $210,000 in seed funding to innovative research projects addressing critical gaps in water and sanitation – we’ve spent a great deal of time these past few months talking about poop.  We plan to keep that trend alive, which brings us to World Toilet Day.

Two and a half billion people – 36 percent of the world’s population – don’t have access to a toilet, according to UNICEF. Globally, more people have mobile phones than toilets. Most people in developed countries think of access to adequate sanitation as a right rather than a privilege.

For this reason, ECS hosted the Electrochemical Energy and Water Summit, where some of the brightest minds in electrochemical and solid state science came together to brainstorm innovative ways to address the global sanitation crisis. We’re not just flushing and forgetting, we’re attempting to make adequate sanitation a basic human right.

(more…)

The ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) is one of the newest peer-reviewed journals from ECS launched in 2012.

Atomic Layer Etch (ALEt) and Atomic Layer Clean (ALC) are emerging as enabling technologies for sub 10nm technology nodes. At these scales performance will be extremely sensitive to process variation.

Atomic layer processes are the most promising path to deliver the precision needed. However, many areas of ALEt and ALC are in need of improved fundamental understanding and process development. This focus issue will cover state-of-the-art efforts that address a variety of approaches to ALEt and ALC.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Surface reaction chemistry and its impact on selectivity
• Plasma ion energy distribution and control methods
• Novel plasma sources and potential application to ALEt & ALC
• Innovative approaches to atomic layer material removal
• Novel device applications of ALEt & ALC
• Process chamber design considerations
• Advanced delivery of chemicals to processing chambers
• Metrology and control of ALEt & ALC
• Device performance impact
• Synthesis of new chemistries for ALEt & ALC application
• Damage free surface defect removal
• Process and discharge modeling

Find out more!

Deadline for submission of manuscripts is December 17, 2014.

Please submit manuscripts here.

The ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) is one of the newest peer-reviewed journals from ECS launched in 2012.

Printing technologies in an atmospheric environment offer the potential for low-cost and materials-efficient alternatives for manufacturing electronics and energy devices such as luminescent displays, thin film transistors, sensors, thin film photovoltaics, fuel cells, capacitors, and batteries.

This focus issue will cover state-of-the-art efforts that address a variety of approaches to printable functional materials and devices.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Printable functional materials: metals; organic conductors; organic and inorganic semiconductors; and more
• Functional printed devices: RFID tags and antenna; thin film transistors; solar cells; and more
• Advances in printing and conversion processes: ink chemistry; ink rheology; printing and drying process; and more
• Advances in conventional and emerging printing techniques: inkjet printing; aerosol printing; flexographic printing; and more

Find out more!

Deadline for submission of manuscripts is November 30, 2014.

Please submit manuscripts here.

Electrochemical Synthesis of Inorganic Compounds: A Bibliography

Zoltan Nagy, a visiting scholar with the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, asked me to post this kind offer:

I have written a bibliography book about Electrochemical Preparation of Inorganic Compounds (Plenum Press, 1985) with thousands of references.

I have continued to collect the references till the beginning of this year, many-many more thousands. But I realized that I will not be able to use them for anything worthwhile.

I am ready to donate the material to anybody who could make valuable use of it. I still have some of the manuscript of the book on disks.  The later ones are in a varied formats. Some on 3X5 cards, some pages copied from Chemical Abstracts with the appropriate abstract circled. And references with abstracts on CDs since 2005.

I would be ready to donate and ship to somebody interested.

I will keep them till the end of the year, if there is no interest, I’ll just get rid of them.

You can contact Zoltan at nagyz@email.unc.edu.

JES is one of the leading journals in the field of electrochemical science and technology, and is currently the second most-cited journal in this field.

We are pleased to announce that the impact factor (IF) for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) has increased by 10% over last year – it is now 2.859 – increasing its ranking for a third year in a row, making it one of the top 10 journals in the electrochemistry category.

JES has gone from #13 (2011 IF) to #11 (2012 IF) to #9 (2013 IF).

Equally important, JES continues to sit among the most-cited journals in electrochemistry, this year coming in as the third most-cited out of all electrochemistry journals.

The Society competes strongly with big publishers
We are especially proud that JES is competing so strongly with journals from much bigger publishers. As a nonprofit society publisher we are very pleased that our mission-based approach is able to continue to produce quality publications that are among the best in our field. Thank you for your support in this; it is our members, authors, reviewers, and editors that make this possible.

All ECS journals have impact factors in 2014
Our newer journals have also been given an impact factor this year, although they cannot be considered “full” impact factors as there is only year of data included in the IF calculation. ECS Electrochemistry Letters (EEL) is already performing strongly with a partial impact factor of 1.54; ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) has an IF of 0.917, and ECS Solid State Letters (SSL) of 0.781. We look forward to seeing how they are performing when the full impact factors are published next year.

(Even the impact factor our archive journal, Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters (ESL), has increased, indicative of the long-term value of publishing with ECS.)

Take advantage of our OA offering to increase visibility
As part of our mission to disseminate our important research as widely as possible, ECS is keen to expand the number of articles published as Open Access. All our authors are offered the choice of publishing their article as OA at the point of submitting their manuscript.

Authors–who have attended one of our meetings, or are ECS members, or who come from subscribing institutions–can publish OA for free by using an article credit.

Find out more about ECS and OA or get in touch with us at oa@electrochem.org.

Thank you for your continued support!

BTW: We look forward to seeing you at our next bi-annual meeting in Chicago or the energy conversion and storage conference in Scotland!

The ECS Conference on Electrochemical Energy Conversion & Storage with SOFC–XIV

The ECS Conference on Electrochemical Energy Conversion & Storage with SOFC–XIV is an international conference convening in Glasgow, Scotland, July 26-31, 2015. It is devoted to all aspects of research, development, and engineering of solid oxide fuel cells, batteries, and low-temperature fuel cells, electrolyzers, and redox flow cells.

This international conference will bring together scientists and engineers to discuss both fundamental advances and engineering innovations.

See the Call for Papers for detailed information about the symposia, manuscript submission requirements, and financial assistance.

Submit your abstract here.

Be a sponsor or exhibitor.

Open access allows free, immediate, online access to peer-reviewed research with full rights to reuse the work.

This week has been declared International Open Access Week. Here at ECS, we’re boldly moving toward open access (OA) publication to make scientific research results and the latest findings more widely accessible, and thereby speeding up the discovery process.

Still, open access can be confusing and controversial at times – specifically for publishers. In order to explain many of the issues and concerns revolving around open access, a few OA advocates have banded together and took to Reddit’s popular “Ask me Anything” series.

Head over there now to see what they had to say about all things open access.

Michael Gordin discusses the universal language of science and the demand for scientists to publish new discoveries in English.
Credit: Frank Wojciechowski

The words “permafrost,” “oxygen,” and “hydrogen” may look like the language of science, but these words really have Russian, Greek and French origins. So how is it that English has become the universal language of science? That is the question Michael Gordin, professor the history of science at Princeton, sets out to answer in his interview with PRI.

“If you look around the world in 1900, and someone told you, ‘Guess what the universal language of science will be in the year 2000?’ You would first of all laugh at them because it was obvious that no one language would be the language of science, but a mixture of French, German and English would be the right answer,” Gordin said in his interview.

Gordin goes on to describe how German – the dominant language of science – collapsed during WWI when a boycott was organized against scientists in Germany and Austria, prohibiting them from attending conferences or publishing in Western European journals. Pair this with the anti-German hysteria taking place in the United States and the rise of American scientific establishments, and you being to see how English started to take over as the universal language of science.

“And you have a set of people who don’t speak foreign languages,” said Gordin, “They’re comfortable in English, they read English, they can get by in English because the most exciting stuff in their mind is happening in English. So you end up with a very American-centric, and therefore very English-centric community of science after World War II.”

Here at ECS, due to our vast number of international members, we know science doesn’t conform to a specific mold or language. Through open access (OA) publication, we hope to break this rigidity and focus on the more important issue – the free dissemination of scientific research for the benefit of all. Find out more about ECS’ bold move toward open access publication and publish your paper as OA today.

Listen to Gordin’s full interview below.