The ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology is now featuring a focus issue on Thermoelectric Materials & Devices: Phonon Engineering, Advanced Materials and Thermal Transport. The issue reflects the symposia from the 228th ECS Meeting on Thermoelectric and Thermal Interface Materials in Phoenix, AZ.

In the issue’s preface, the authors tell us that advances in this field, “. . . can inspire developments in thermoelectrics that may underpin the next major advance in energy harvesting and cooling and ultimately improve the quality of our devices, and help drive energy efficiency and a greener society.”

The focus issue discusses advances, challenges, and applications in thermoelectrics and its various sub-fields such as phonon transport physics, materials science, electronics, condensed matter physics, engineering, the chemistry of materials, and processing technology.

The Society would like to thank the authors, reviewers, and editors who contributed to this focus issue. Special thank you to Colm O’Dwyer from University College Cork, Renkun Chen from the University of California, San Diego, Jr-Hau He from King Abdulla University of Science and Technology, Jaeho Lee from the University of California Irvine, and Kafil M. Razeeb from University College Cork.

Read the focus issue in the ECS Digital Library.

Now is a very important time for institutions to have uninterrupted access to ECS content. A recent evaluation suggests that more than half of ECS published content involves the sustainability of our planet!

Important work in batteries, energy conversion, fuel cells, nanostructures, and more is being released every day from researchers and contributors in ECS peer-reviewed and rapid publication journals, and other ECS titles.

The Society offers various subscription packages:

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ECS is a sponsor of the 68th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE) being held August 27 – September 1, 2017 in Providence, Rhode Island.

The scientific theme of the meeting is Electrochemistry without Borders, meant to emphasize the global character of the electrochemical community encompassed by the ISE.

ECS is continuing its partnership with ISE and will be presenting a symposium on “Education for Electrochemistry and Electrochemical Engineering” covering present and future trends in electrochemistry and electrochemical engineering education at undergraduate and/or graduate levels.

Also, ECS President Krishnan Rajeshwar from The University of Texas at Arlington will be presenting “Photoelectrochemistry, Solid-State Chemistry, and Solar Fuels: A Nexus?” at this meeting.

Please visit the conference website for more information and to submit your abstract before March 22.

By: Mary Yess, ECS Deputy Executive Director & Chief Content Officer

Richard Poynder (@RickyPo) is well-known and well-respected in the open access community, especially for his “Open and Shut?” blog. Poynder has written an excellent post, which is part interview with Philip Cohen, founder of the SocArXiv preprint server, and part synopsis of the resurgent preprint server movement. The precursor of them all is arXiv, which was founded way back in 1991. Poynder asks, can preprint servers “gain sufficient traction, impetus, and focus to push the revolution the open access movement began in a more desirable direction?”

The post also talks a good bit about the preprint server framework created by the Center for Open Science (COS). ECS, who is working with COS on launching our own preprint server, gets several mentions in the article as well. In this age of 8-second attention spans, it’s a long article, but it’s well worth the read.

By: Jeff Inglis, The Conversation

Editor’s note: The following is a roundup of archival stories.

On March 14, or 3/14, mathematicians and other obscure-holiday aficionados celebrate Pi Day, honoring π, the Greek symbol representing an irrational number that begins with 3.14. Pi, as schoolteachers everywhere repeat, represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

What is Pi Day, and what, really, do we know about π anyway? Here are three-and-bit-more articles to round out your Pi Day festivities.

A silly holiday

First off, a reflection on this “holiday” construct. Pi itself is very important, writes mathematics professor Daniel Ullman of George Washington University, but celebrating it is absurd:

The Gregorian calendar, the decimal system, the Greek alphabet, and pies are relatively modern, human-made inventions, chosen arbitrarily among many equivalent choices. Of course a mood-boosting piece of lemon meringue could be just what many math lovers need in the middle of March at the end of a long winter. But there’s an element of absurdity to celebrating π by noting its connections with these ephemera, which have themselves no connection to π at all, just as absurd as it would be to celebrate Earth Day by eating foods that start with the letter “E.”

And yet, here we are, looking at the calendar and getting goofily giddy about the sequence of numbers it shows us.

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The winter 2016 issue of Interface is now available in the ECS Digital Library! This issue celebrates 25 years of Interface! Since its establishment, Interface has continuously provided Society members with top of the line technical articles about the latest developments in the fields of solid state and electrochemical science and technology. It also provides news and information about and for members.

This issue includes a special reflection article on its 25 years that contains highlights from every past quarterly issue of Interface, since its start in 1992. It also covers the highlights from PRiME 2016, where 67 countries were represented.

With Interface, members never miss out on updates such as Society news, people news, student news, and important technology highlights. Featured articles from the sensor division issue include:

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ECS is committed to open access through Free the Science, an initiative to completely open our research library and implement open science tools to further scientific advancement in our fields of research.

Our efforts are part of a much larger movement happening across the world. The Open Research Funders Group was announced late last year with foundational support from big names like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation, to name a few. Recently, the James S. McDonnell Foundation joined the group that is committed to increasing access to research outputs. Using their positions as major funding institutions, the group believes that openness accelerates discovery, reduces information-sharing gaps, encourages innovations, and promotes reproducibility. See a complete list of members of the Open Research Funders Group here.

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden announced in a speech to the American Association for Cancer Research that open access, open data, and new research incentives are the best way to contribute to the fight against cancer. In line with his Cancer Moonshot initiative, Biden laid out a series of policy priorities to incentivize open sharing of research data and open access to research articles. Learn more about the Cancer Moonshot initiative here.

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ECS isn’t the only one celebrating an anniversary this year. As we celebrate 115 years of excellence as a publisher, meeting convener, and multi-faceted scientific society, this year also marks an important 15-year milestone in the open access movement. In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative was hosted by the Open Society Foundations and to this day serves as a landmark meeting in communicating the importance and urgency of open access necessities.

The participants in the conference served as the founding researchers of open access, drafting a widely circulated declaration to articulate the goals of the open access (OA) movement. This declaration was signed by over 5,000 organizations and individuals, including ECS.

The declaration reads in part:

Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

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Think.Check.Submit.

ECS wants you to learn how to publish with a trusted journal.  A cross-industry initiative called Think.Check.Submit. is led by representatives from various organizations and publishers that encourages authors to find trusted journals for their research. It provides easy steps to follow about safe publishing as well as questions authors should be asking themselves.

ECS and our friends at Think.Check.Submit. are encouraging authors to:

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