Robert Savinell, editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society

Since 1902, ECS’s flagship journal—the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) originally published as Transactions of The Electrochemical Society—has published some of the best and most innovative research in the field of electrochemical science and technology.

With a historical tradition of scientific excellence and commitment to the pursuit and open exchange of scientific knowledge, JES has accumulated papers through the years that have long-lasting merit. In an effort to preserve the voices of distinguished scientists and engineers who have helped shape our world, the Society implemented the ECS Digital Library Leadership Collection.

Robert Savinell, professor at Case Western Reserve University, is one of the newest faces to conserve this highly significant research. Through a generous gift to the ECS Digital Library, The Robert F. Savinell Collection has been established and the Society has taken yet another step toward its commitment to open access publishing.

Preserving the science of the past

“Most of the papers that get published in the ECS journals have long-lasting value,” says Savinell, editor of JES. “They’re more than just recent news blurbs that introduce a new idea that in a few years will fade away.”

Through a strong editorial and peer-review process, the papers published in JES are not only topically relevant when they are published, but also carry a fundamental insight that applies more broadly than their specific application.

“I think there’s a lot of value in that kind of information that’s being archived forever,” Savinell says.

Beyond the preservation of these timeless voices, Savinell’s gift to the leadership collection supports ECS’s commitment to open access publishing—something Savinell sees as the ultimate future of scholarly publications.

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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.

The colors surrounding the Altmetric “donut” reflect the mix of sources contributing to an article’s Altmetric score.

For many years, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), as indexed in Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports (JCR), in the world of academic publishing has been accepted as a near-universal means of measuring the importance of scholarly publications. Despite the widespread use of this traditional bibliometric, the JIF lacks the ability to provide authors and readers information regarding the impact of individual articles.

Starting in December 2014, ECS joined the ranks of many other scholarly publishers supplementing aggregate journal impact data (provided by the JIF) with a type of article level metrics (ALMs) called alternative metrics, or “altmetrics,” as they have come to be known. To provide article-level impact data for its journals, ECS has chosen to use the article level metrics service provided by the company Altmetric.

Article level metrics are a better way for authors to track the discussion and attention surrounding their works. Unlike the JIF, the Altmetric system reports data for articles, from a variety of potential sources. Using these data, Altmetric generates a score for individual articles in near-real-time. These scores are produced using a number of outlets including

• online reference managers (Mendeley, CiteULike);
• mainstream media (newspapers and magazines); and
• social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

The data acquired from these sources are weighted based on the volume of attention, the sources of attention, and the influence or relative importance of the source.

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