2023: Year of Re‐Debut (2023)

Dear Readers, The transistor, the basic building block of modern computation, which has greatly driven the progress in the semiconductor industry, as well as inspired much of the research published in Advanced Electronic Materials, is celebrating its 75th anniversary. At this time, we therefore note how our fundamental understanding of the nature of electronic structures and the industrial adoption of advanced electronic technologies in modern life have transformed our world into a hyper-connected community, which is particularly evident by the societal connections shaped by the global pandemic. As we enter 2023, we recall the essence of the free flow of data sharing that reached unprecedented levels to accelerate the pace of research into combating the coronavirus disease. Open science is surging! We are therefore pleased to announce that Advanced Electronic Materials has been converted into a fully open access journal, starting in 2023, the year of our “re-debut”. Over the 8 years since the journal's launch, our community and readership has grown, and we have become established as a top forum for the publication of high-quality high-impact research in all fields of electronics. We are excited to see a new chapter about to start in our journal's story, and we remain committed to providing the best possible service to our authors, reviewers, and readers. There will be no change in the journal's workflows when we move into this new open access model. The scope, aims, and decision-making will still very much fall within the remit of the editorial team. We will continue to strive to publish breakthrough discoveries and cutting-edge research where materials science and electronics meet, and we are looking forward to everyone being able to read the journal, irrespective of specialty, host institution, or location. For more information regarding open access, please see here. With this most exciting news brightening our present, we would also like to look back on some impressive results achieved in 2022: Thanks to the strongest support of our authors, reviewers, and readers, Advanced Electronics Materials is continuing to make records of its own, having reached the highest impact factor in the journal's history, 7.633 (2022 Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate Analytics). Some of the articles that contributed the most with their citations to this achievement are listed in Table 1. We congratulate these authors on their great success. While topics such as memories, 2D materials/devices, flexible electronics, ferroelectrics/magnetoelectrics, and sensors, keep on attracting significant interest from our readership, we have also seen a steady growth in manuscripts covering optoelectronics, piezoelectrics, spintronics, thermoelectrics, and electromagnetic applications, as well as more fundamental research into condensed matter physics. Many published articles have also drawn huge attention via news and social media platforms, reflected by their high Altmetric scores. A selection of articles that had an exceptionally broad impact in the media in 2022 is shown in Table 2. Another highlight is that the concept of “UltraRAM” has been selected for the virtual collection of Best of Advanced journals 2022. Besides, we have seen a 30% increase in the number of articles downloaded from Advanced Electronic Materials, now around 35 000 per month. We know from our experience of converting journals to open access that this can result in a significant increase in readership and citations of the journal's articles. We hope a more permissive use and sharing of the published articles will help our authors to increase the dissemination of their research in the upcoming years. In 2022, Advanced Electronic Materials featured three special projects: i) “Recent Developments in Organic Neuromorphic Devices”, a virtual issue guest-edited by Paschalis Gkoupidenis (Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research) and Robert A. Nawrocki (Purdue University), gathering the best research articles and reviews in the field of organic neuromorphic electronics. ii) “Ferroelectric and Multiferroic Materials”, a special issue reflecting the robust health of the field of ferroelectricity, guest-edited by Neil Mathur (University of Cambridge) and Jiamian Hu (University of Wisconsin-Madison). The topics span from description of aspects of ferroelectric domain switching, developments with CMOS-compatible ferroelectrics and coupling between polarization and other parameters. iii) “Celebrating Rainer Waser's 65th Anniversary”, a special issue dedicated to Rainer Waser, a pioneer of resistive switching memory, guest-edited by Ilia Valov (Research Centre Juelich), Dmitri Strukov (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (Waseda University), which is focused on the fundamental understanding of the operational principles and physical mechanisms underlying memristive devices (Figure 1). In 2018, we launched our “Excellence of Electronics” series, which collects invited-only review articles to highlight the outstanding work of our most prominent authors. This series will be resumed in 2023 and we believe with certainty that it will serve and inspire the community in our new open access model. We will further expand this initiative to host a series of virtual events with the same name by leveraging the power of online events to boost engagement with the community and connect with a wider audience. Our first event (APAC-friendly) was held on December 15, 2022, and was attended by six of our board members and authors from Asia–Pacific countries. Ming Liu (Fudan University); Takao Someya (the University of Tokyo); Cheol Seong Hwang (Seoul National University); Nanshu Lu (the University of Texas at Austin); Joshua Yang (University of Southern California); and Chwee Teck Lim (National University of Singapore) shared fascinating research findings taking place in their labs, which have been generating a lasting impact on people's lives. Last but not least, we would also like to inform you that we have renewed our Advisory Board to further guide and shape our journals through the changing publishing landscape of electronic materials research. We hope to bring in new, talented board members to cultivate a clearer identity that will help authors differentiate between our family of journals, and to echo the industrial aspects of electronics research. We are truly delighted that the following researchers have accepted our invitation to join the Advisory Board After restructuring our internal editorial responsibilities last year, Advanced Electronic Materials continues to strive to improve, reiterate, and refine our journal strategies toward the bright and shiny future of open science. We cannot wait to see how this exciting change to the journal contributes to reaching the journal's potential audience and reach more readers than previously possible. Prospects for further recovery will advance in 2023, the year of the “re-debut” for Advanced Electronic Materials, by which we hope to reinvigorate existing cooperations and catalyze new ones. Again, we would like to sincerely thank our Advisory Board members, authors, reviewers, and readers for their continuous support. We at Advanced Electronic Materials wish all of you a healthy, successful, and happy 2023 and look forward to your exciting research in the upcoming year! Lu Shi Editor-in-Chief On behalf of the editorial team