Editorial Revisado por pares

200 Years of John Wiley and Sons

2006; Wiley; Volume: 46; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/anie.200604745

ISSN

1521-3773

Autores

Peter Gölitz,

Tópico(s)

Science and Science Education

Resumo

In 1807 Goethe wrote, Beethoven composed, Goya painted, Humboldt researched, Napoleon ruled—though only in continental Europe; George III reigned in England, Thomas Jefferson presided over a “wise and frugal Government” in the USA, an emperor of the Qing Dynasty ruled in China in times of social unrest, and Tenno Kokaku was the leader of Japan during a period of peace that had lasted hundreds of years—the millers milled, the blacksmiths hammered, and in New York Charles Wiley opened up a small printing shop. And what has grown out of these modest beginnings is truly amazing! John Wiley and Sons is today a global publisher that is highly esteemed not only in view of its economic figures, but also because of the breadth of its enterprise and particularly the quality of its products. The publishing house was built up over six generations of the Wiley family, and in those 200 years the company needed only ten CEOs, which is astonishing when one considers that the USA had 43 presidents in the same time period. Today, John Wiley and Sons is led by William J. Pesce, the company's President and CEO; Peter Booth Wiley, a great-great-great-grandson of the company's founder, serves as Chairman of the Board. His brother Bradford Wiley II also serves on the Board, and his sister Deborah E. Wiley is a Senior Vice President.1 John Wiley and Sons has three main branches: 1) The professional and trade part publishes reference and specialty books for the general public, with an emphasis on finance and business literature, but also more diversified subjects such as architecture and cookbooks as well as the popular “for Dummies” line and Frommer's travel guides all belong to this general category; 2) the higher education branch publishes textbooks, primarily for college students; 3) the scientific, technical, and medical (STM) division publishes monographs, handbooks, encyclopedias, databases, and more than 450 journals. The central subjects include the medical, life, and materials sciences, physics, engineering—and, above all, chemistry. It's been over ten years since the German Chemical Society (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh) sold its own publishing house, the VCH Verlagsgesellschaft (previously Verlag Chemie), to John Wiley and Sons in 1996, and today its journals—just like those of more than 50 other scientific societies—are published at Wiley with tremendous success. Today, nearly all of the publisher's products are also accessible electronically at Wiley InterScience. More on the history and current operations at John Wiley and Sons can be found on the pages following this Editorial and naturally on the internet as well at the address http://www.wiley.com. As of 1807, chemistry had already been established as a science: at the time, 13 years had passed since the death of Lavoisier, Berzelius had just become professor in Stockholm, Humphry Davy succeeded in the preparation of pure potassium and sodium, and it had been 30 years since the founding of the first professional chemistry journal, the Chemische Journal für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst und Manufacturen edited by Lorenz Crell. Much of what else was happening in chemistry at the start of the 19th century, with an emphasis on the Anglo-Saxon world, is recounted by Otto Krätz and Elisabeth Vaupel in their informative and extraordinarily entertaining Essay “1807. Observations Regarding Chemistry in the Anglo-Saxon World during the Napoleonic Period” on page 24 ff. Commemorations provide an occasion for reflection on the past, but they would be missed opportunities if one did not also contemplate what the future holds. And this is exactly what Nicola Armaroli and Vincenzo Balzani do in an Essay titled “The Future of Energy Supply: Challenges and Opportunities” on page 52 ff. This topic offers plenty of material for discussion, and the editorial office is prepared to publish on our homepage any input our readers might have dealing with the scientific (rather than the political) implications. Decisions on the acceptance of manuscripts for this online forum “Chemistry and Energy” will be made by the editors. Please direct your contributions to angewandte@wiley-vch.de. Armaroli and Balzani will offer an immediate response, and this should facilitate a lively discussion. The even more encompassing topic of “Chemistry and Sustainability” will be addressed in several Reviews in the course of the year 2007. Apart from 200 years of John Wiley and Sons other important anniversaries can be celebrated in 2007. The French Chemical Society (Société Française de Chimie) was founded 150 years ago, and it will celebrate this with a large symposium from July 16–18 in Paris (see http://www.sfc07.fr). In 1867, 140 years ago, the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft was founded, in 1877 the Verein analytischer Chemiker and in 1887 the deutsche Gesellschaft für angewandte Chemie; the last one was the founder of Angewandte Chemie as a journal for their members. The Hungarian Chemical Society was founded 100 years ago and has effectively commenced its centennial celebration with the outstanding 1st European Chemical Congress held last August. The Chemical Abstracts first appeared 100 years ago, and Eduard Buchner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on alcoholic fermentation, where he was able to show that enzymatic reactions can also take place in the absence of cells. A part of the present—and most certainly of the future—supramolecular chemistry already occupies a page in history. Charles Pedersen published his legendary work on crown ethers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society 40 years ago, Jean-Marie Lehn coined the term “supramolecular chemistry” 30 years ago, and both of them, together with Donald Cram, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 20 years ago. Commemoration of these key events serves as occasion for a second featured theme in this issue, which commences with a prologue from the Chairman of the Editorial Board, François Diederich, himself an eminent supramolecular chemist, on page 68 ff. This commentary is followed by a monumental—in every sense of the word—Review by David Leigh on molecular motors and machines (p. 72 ff.), a topic which once more demonstrates not only that the bio-, nano-, and materials sciences are based on chemistry but that they, to a large extent, are chemistry. The Communications section includes a series of distinguished works on supramolecular chemistry—without the need for invitation these manuscripts arrived per chance in the autumn—as if by self-assembly! Running a journal like Angewandte Chemie can in a way be likened to “steering self-assembly”, in that it is enormously reliant on what is supplied by its authors, and one hopes that the contributions that are published will be of interest to its readers and will serve as a stimulus for their work and eventually lead to new inspiring publications. To continually spark enthusiam in chemistry and incite new ideas with every issue of Angewandte Chemie are especially gratifying for me as I stand on the eve of my 25th anniversary as Editor-in-Chief. There is indeed much to celebrate in the coming year! All that remains for me to do, then, is to congratulate our publishing house on the bicentenary, thank you, our readers, authors, and referees, and to wish you all the best for 2007. Peter Gölitz1 PS: The overview of the previous year's volume that normally accompanies the first Issue of the year will be published at a later date. For now, attention is here directed to a new service to readers: RSS Feed. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, and with this free service readers can efficiently keep track of articles published online as soon as they become available. RSS Feed makes following journal content from multiple sources extremely simple and practical: Using any of the many online newsreaders, you can subscribe to news feeds from Angewandte Chemie and from all your other favorite Wiley and non-Wiley journals, and you automatically receive all Early View and other preprint articles within one account as soon as they are online—it's like having an e-mail inbox reserved only for the latest high-quality chemistry! For more information, see the internet address http://interscience.wiley.com/rss.1 1 Illustration of the variety of current Wiley products.

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