Michael Faraday may have suggested that the formula for scientific success is “work, finish, publish,” but Faraday said that back in the 19th century. In 2016, there are plenty of compelling reasons to tack another item onto the end of the list. Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making your work just a drop in the ocean (and we have authors who do a lot of work). In order to ensure that your work is read, cited, and has impact, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to add a little self-promotion to your workflow.

To help you get started we have a few suggestions – here are ECS’s top 5 tips to maximize impact and promote your published research.

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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…)

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.

ORCID poster by jennycham.co.uk

What is ORCID?

ORCID, or Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is an organization that aims to ensure that all scientific works can be appropriately attributed to their authors. By providing members with unique 16-digit persistent digital identifiers (called ORCID identifiers) and maintaining a central registry of members, ORCID is rapidly taking hold in the research community as a means of improving the accuracy of attribution, collaboration, and funding.

Due to the ever-expanding and international nature of scientific literature, the need for a unique identifier has become increasingly apparent. First and last names can be unreliable and inaccurate due to cultural differences in name-order conventions, changing last names due to marriage, or inconsistent use of abbreviations or initials. All of these factors can lead to the unfortunate result of authors being incorrectly credited (or worse, not credited) for their work.

The use of ORCID identifiers actively prevents this potentially damaging mishap, instead allowing journals and institutions to accurately monitor individual authors’ contributions to science.

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“The unique and longer-term part of our OA plan is to “Free the Science™“: to provide all ECS content at no cost to anyone—no fees for authors, readers, and libraries.”

Published in the latest issue of Interface.

The models of scientific communication and publication—which have served us all so well for so long—are no longer fully meeting the spirit of the ECS mission, may not be financially viable, and are hurting the dissemination of the results of scientific research.

The future of Open Access (OA) can change not only scholarly publishing, but can change the nature of scientific communication itself. OA has the power to more “evenly distribute” the advantages currently given to those who can easily access the outputs of scientific research.

ECS has long been concerned with facilitating that access, and our mission has been to disseminate the content from within our technical domain, as broadly as possible, and with as few barriers as possible. To accomplish this, we have maintained a robust, high-quality, high-impact publishing program for over 100 years.

Several years ago, ECS started taking a serious look at the challenges facing us in fulfilling our mission, specifically with respect to our publishing program. The challenges—faced by others in publishing, to a greater or lesser degree—are many and have become increasingly sever.

When a commercial scientific publisher is taking a 35% net profit out of the system, compared with under 2% by ECS, something is not only wrong, but it is clear that some publishers will do anything and everything they can to keep maintaining that level of profit. For many, journal publishing has indeed become a business.

Read the rest.

“Comprehensive scientific assessments of our current and potential future climates clearly indicate that climate change is real, largely attributable to emissions from human activities, and potentially a very serious problem.” This is pulled from a public policy statement originally written in 2004 by the American Chemical Society.

Eighteen scientific societies signed on to a similar American Association for the Advancement of Science statement affirming the consensus scientific view on climate change in 2009. According to the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, at least 200 worldwide scientific organizations now formally hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. Recently, the panel released a major report, capping its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is due to human activity. More than 700 of the world’s top climate scientists and 1,729 expert reviewers from more than 70 countries participated in the report process.

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An article by Kenji Amaya, Naoki Yoneya, and Yuki Onishi published in the latest issue of Interface.

Protecting structures from corrosion is one of the most important challenges in engineering. Cathodic protection using sacrificial anodes or impressing current from electrodes is applied to many marine structures. Prediction of the corrosion rates of structures and the design of cathodic protection systems have been traditionally based on past experience with a limited number of empirical formulae.

Recently, application of numerical methods such as the boundary element method (BEM) or finite element method (FEM) to corrosion problems has been studied intensively, and these methods have become powerful tools in the study of corrosion problems.

With the progress in numerical simulations, “Inverse Problems” have received a great deal of attention. The “Inverse Problem” is a research methodology pertaining to identifying unknown information from external or indirect observation utilizing a model of the system.

Read the rest.

The aluminum-air battery has the potential to serve as a short-term power source for electric vehicles.
Image: Journal of The Electrochemical Society

A new long-life aluminum-air battery is set to resolve challenges in rechargeable energy storage technology, thanks to ECS member Ryohei Mori.

Mori’s development has yielded a new type of aluminum-air battery, which is rechargeable by refilling with either salt or fresh water.

The research is detailed in an open access article in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, where Mori explains how he modified the structure of the previous aluminum-air battery to ensure a longer battery life.

Theoretically, metal-air technology can have very high energy densities, which makes it a promising candidate for next-generation batteries that could enable such things as long-range battery-electric vehicles.

However, the long-standing barrier of anode corrosion and byproduct accumulation have halted these batteries from achieving their full potential. Dr. Mori’s recently published paper, “Addition of Ceramic Barriers to Aluminum-Air batteries to Suppress By-product Formation on Electrodes,” details how to combat this issue.

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An article by N.J. Laycock, D.P. Krouse, S.C. Hendy, and D.E. Williams published in the latest issue of Interface.

Stainless steels and other corrosion resistant alloys are generally protected from the environment by ultra-thin layers of surface oxides, also called passive films. Unfortunately, these films are not perfect and their Achilles’ heel is a propensity to catastrophic local breakdown, which leads to rapid corrosion of the metallic substructure. Aside from the safety and environmental hazards associated with these events, the economic impact is enormous.

In the oil and gas and petrochemical industries, it is of course usually possible to select from experience a corrosion-resistant alloy that will perform acceptably in a given service environment. This knowledge is to a large extent captured in industry or company-specific standards, such as Norsok M1.

However, these selections are typically very conservative because the limits tend to be driven by particular incidents or test results, rather than by fundamental understanding. Decision-making can be very challenging, especially in today’s mega-facilities, where the cost of production downtime is often staggeringly large. Thus significant practical benefits could be gained from reliable quantitative models for pitting corrosion of stainless steels. There have been several attempts to develop purely stochastic models of pitting corrosion.

Read the rest.