Authors: Ana V. Almeida | Esther Levy | Jolke Perelaer | Marco Squillaci
Source: Advanced Materials Technologies (article, 2021-01-01)
Field: Materials Science — Materials Chemistry

Creating and Innovating in Interesting Times As 2021 opens its gates, it's with mixed feelings that we reflect on what is behind us. In an exceptional year, shaped by a global pandemic affecting everyone's daily lives and the global research community in unprecedented ways, re-adjustment and adaptation played, and certainly will continue to play, a central role. Many institutions remain closed, with researchers working from home under unusual circumstances, and experimental work suffers major disruptions. While all these aspects cause, for the most part, feelings of uncertainty, it is with awe that we witness human nature refusing to be contained and finding alternative ways to reach out, connect, share and exchange. This is most evident in science. As we write this editorial, it has been five years since the launch of Advanced Materials Technologies, where bright eyed and bushy tailed, we proclaimed: “Advanced Materials Technologies — When a Material really is a Material”. It was evident back then that “materials science lies at the heart of technology” and there was a need to harbor the increasing “work aimed at turning new materials into real applications”. The vision was to embrace the “multidisciplinary nature of technological innovation”, and to publish devices and technologies “which cannot yet be dreamed of!”. Multidisciplinarity has remained a constant in the intervening five years, with numerous published papers being devoted to device design, fabrication and performance across many disciplines. This can be visualized in Figure 1, which illustrates the relative popularity of different fabrication methods, morphologies, materials and applications. Having its fifth year of existence in the unpredictable 2020, Advanced Material Technologies saw, against more conservative expectations, a successful year, driven by a strong and passionate community. Similarly to 2019, we received over 1000 submissions and published close to 400 manuscripts; with over 3500 papers submitted and over 1200 papers published since the journal was launched (Figure 2). Advanced Materials Technologies hasn't just become a popular place to publish materials technology research; papers in the journal are being noticed and read more, with a steep increase in article usage particularly in the last couple of years, and social- and news media attention and dissemination (Figure 3) reaching beyond the scientific community. The impact and quality of the research published in Advanced Materials Technologies shone through with a 2019 Impact Factor of 5.969 (2020 Clarivate Journal Citation Reports) and our top five most cited articles have garnered around 100 citations each (Table 1). Having matured and established itself as a reference journal in its field, we have undertaken several initiatives to complement the regular submissions published in Advanced Materials Technologies. Topics of interest to our audience are highlighted in several special issues, coordinated by experts in the respective fields. So far, we have published four topical special issues dedicated to Renewable Energy Technologies, Electronic Textiles, Microfluidics and Bioelectronics (Figure 4). A special section dedicated to the Heidelberg Innovation Lab is in the making, and further topical special issues are planned. We would like to take this moment to thank all our Guest Editors for their motivation and support and without whom such special projects would not be possible. In celebration of the fifth volume of Advanced Materials Technologies, we launched the Hall of Fame series, where over 20 reviews of cutting-edge materials technology research written by leading experts across the multidisciplinary scope of the journal have been collected. This series will continue to be updated in 2021 and its articles will be freely accessible for a limited time. This collection will, with certainty, serve and inspire the community for years to come and we thank the authors for their contribution. We also published a special series of 35 articles on Intelligent Systems between September 2018 and June 2019. Topics included robotics, automation and control, the human-machine interface, responsive materials, smart sensors and neuromorphic computing. This series was so successful that in the middle of last year we launched an interdisciplinary open access journal, Advanced Intelligent Systems, whose scope goes well beyond the topics covered in the special series to also include research on artificial intelligence and machine learning and disciplines outside materials science (Figure 5). Not only the scientific content is worth highlighting but also the creativity and artistic sense of many of our authors. Science is indeed an inspiring muse, and when in the right hands, beauty (and many times humor) happens. A picture is worth thousand words as we can see in many of our covers (Figure 6). To celebrate this special fifth anniversary with you, an online symposium was held on September 17th, 2020. We achieved more than 9600 impressions on social media and over 2600 people watched the live streaming (Figure 7). Thank you for joining us and making this a successful event. In case you would like to re-watch it or missed it in the first place, a recording is available for on-demand viewing here. Unprecedented seems to be the keyword of 2020, but not only for negative reasons. 2020 was the first year where there was a decrease of greenhouse gas emissions, even if temporary, and the year that two women shared the Nobel prize for chemistry (Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna) for the “development of a method for genome editing" – the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors, drastically changing and shaping their research field, as well as inspiring researchers to keep pushing boundaries and breaking glass ceilings. Being supported by a broad, international community, and with a strong motivation to address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), we are reviewing our International Editorial Advisory Board to ensure that it better represents the community we serve. We will keep working on strengthening underrepresented fields in the journal and remain committed to quality and to you. To better deliver this, our team was reinforced with two new editors, Ana V. Almeida who is also an Associate Editor for Advanced Materials, Advanced Science and Small and is located in our office in Weinheim; and Fangyuan Jiang, who is also an Assistant Editor for Advanced Energy Materials, Advanced Functional Materials and Physica Status Solidi and is located in our office in Beijing (Figure 8). In addition to this, measures are being implemented to significantly improve the author, reviewer and reader experience in Advanced Materials Technologies and its sister journals. For example, article harmonization has resulted in the replacement of both Communication and Full Paper formats by the more inclusive Research Article, which can contain original research studies of any length. Great efforts are also being directed towards open science, with data availability statements and recommended data repositories made available and easily accessible to the community. These initiatives are part of a global project across Wiley to make life easier for researchers when preparing, submitting, reviewing and reading manuscripts. More information on these topics can be found in the updated author guidelines. Complementing these initiatives, Advanced Materials Technologies and Advanced Materials are piloting a revamped reviewer questionnaire and Reviewer Guidelines designed to better assist reviewers with their assessment of manuscripts and aid editorial decisions. We welcome your feedback, which will be used to help optimize the new reviewer questionnaire and guidelines before they are rolled out more widely to the Advanced family. Last but not least, a heartfelt thank you—to our authors, reviewers, Advisory Board members, and readers—for making this journey possible, and for inspiring us to look to the next five years with visions of dreams coming true. We look forward to more exciting publications in the upcoming year and wish you a happy, healthy, and successful 2021! Materials science ; Nanotechnology ; Engineering ethics ; Manufacturing engineering ; Engineering physics ; Business ; Engineering Machine Learning in Materials Science