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The First Decade with Wiley‐VCH (2010–2019)

2020; Wiley; Volume: 60; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/ijch.202000020

1869-5868

Ehud Keinan,

History and advancements in chemistry

Dear Reader, Although the Israel Journal of Chemistry is now 70 years old, the past decade with Wiley-VCH has been significantly different from its first 60 years. While celebrating the outstanding achievements of this journal during the previous decade, it is important to look back at recent history in order to understand the magnitude of the accomplishment. In 2008, while starting my first term as ICS president, I also accepted an offer from the Laser Pages Publishing House in Jerusalem to serve as the 6th editor-in-chief of the IJC. Considering the situation of the journal at that time, it was a very difficult decision. All members of the IJC Editorial Board shared a gloomy forecast for this journal. The IJC was published at the time as a printed quarterly in a black and white format. The poor subscription rates, globalization trends in science publishing, and increased financial losses all led to a melancholic mood within the editorial board, with some proposing to terminate all activities and close the journal. At that time, many other national journals worldwide ceased to exist for the same reasons. However, closing a 60-year-old journal that had survived the ebb and flow of a very bumpy road since the establishment of the State of Israel seemed to me totally unacceptable. Consequently, taking over as editor-in-chief required non-trivial decisions. My own research into the history of the IJC eventually resulted in a historical account, which I published together with Prof. Shalom Sarel of the Hebrew University.1 Prof. Sarel (1918–2015) served as president of the Israel Chemical Society in 1960–1964 and later became the 4th editor-in-chief of the IJC in 1976–1988. Undoubtedly, he was a key figure in the process of the reestablishment, crystallization, and institutional design of both the ICS and the IJC, deserving much credit for their current modern formats. He also founded the School of Pharmacy of the Hebrew University and the Medicinal Chemistry Section of the ICS. Prof. Sarel has become a role model for many of us, demonstrating how much can be done with very few resources. In 2013, at age 95, he was recognized as the first Honorable Member of the ICS. My irrational optimism concerning the future of the IJC stemmed from two major considerations. First, the IJC had a continuous history of publishing good science over more than 60 years. Second, Israel has been blessed with a very strong community of chemists who could guarantee the high quality of this journal in a highly competitive world. In addition, I remembered the words of our first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion: “In Israel, anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist.” Probably more appropriate were the words of George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable.” It was clear to me that saving the journal would require a significant expansion of its scope and the establishment of a strong editorial board,2 as well as transferring it to a world-renowned publishing house. I shared my views with an old friend, Dr. Peter Gölitz, with whom I used to meet quite often in international conferences. Peter was my role model regarding all aspects of science publishing. Chemists of my age remember very well the weak international stature of Angewandte Chemie in 1982, when Peter Gölitz took over as editor-in-chief, and the heights ascended by that journal under his leadership. In addition to running Angewandte Chemie, Peter founded, within two decades (1988–2009), a broad variety of successful journals and served as their first editor-in-chief. The long list includes Advanced Materials, Chemistry – A European Journal, ChemBioChem, ChemPhysChem, Small, ChemMedChem, Chemistry – An Asian Journal, ChemSusChem, ChemCatChem, and others. In one of my meetings with Peter, I suggested transferring the IJC to Wiley-VCH, which I considered then, and to this day, one of the best publishing houses for chemistry worldwide. Realizing that Wiley-VCH did not have a dedicated review journal in their portfolio, I suggested that the IJC focus on review articles more than on original research papers. However, Peter had a different idea. He proposed to follow the precedents of Wiley-VCH with various other national European journals, namely, changing the name, the cover graphics, and also the content. I could not agree with such a proposal because I viewed it as the equivalent of a known practice in the business world, that of casting new content into the shell of a failing company. I insisted on maintaining the journal's continuity, its national identity, and even its cover graphics, with the colors of our national flag. I also insisted on keeping an editorial board comprising Israeli scientists and also requested that the journal become the official journal of the ICS, which has never been the case before. Apparently, our positions were too far apart to reach an agreement. It took several years of negotiations with no results, in which we maintained our disagreement, until Peter finally decided to take the risk, probably based on our personal acquaintance and trust. We signed a three-party deal between Wiley-VCH, Laser Pages, and the ICS. In retrospect, all parties had good reasons to be happy with the agreement, and that is certainly the case now, with a visible record of ten successful years. Some of these stories were mentioned in the reception dinner of the 6th Angewandte Symposium, which was held in February 15, 2017, at the Dan Panorama Hotel, Tel-Aviv.3 The beginning was not easy, particularly with the ambitious decision to triple the volume from 4 black and white issues annually to 12 issues in color. We had to knock on many doors of good friends and ask for their help in serving as guest editors of special issues, and we had to solicit potential authors, convincing them to accept tight deadlines, etc. Our publishing horizon was as close as 2–3 issues ahead, with no guarantee that we would be able to go beyond that (now our publishing horizon is about 18 issues ahead). I knew that the practice of operating under highly stressful conditions with high levels of uncertainty could not be applied in Europe and the USA, but seemed quite common in the chaotic, high-risk-high-gain Israeli culture. The results turned out to be very encouraging and rewarding. In 2007–2009, before moving to Wiley-VCH, the Impact Factor of the IJC did not exceed the range of 0.3–0.5. In 2010 it jumped to 0.794, in 2011 it doubled again to 1.535 and since 2012 it has stabilized at the range of 2.5–3.0. For several years the IJC has published on a regular basis approximately 120 articles annually, on about 1200 journal pages. The usage growth from 2010 to 2019 was about 1200 %, i. e., a twelve-fold increase, and the journal keeps attracting increasing attention at an impressive rate. For example, the usage growth for 2018 vs. 2017 exceeded 65 %, and the growth for 2019 vs. 2018 was 30 %. According to data from the Journal Citations Report (JCR), the Immediacy Index went up from 0.120 in 2009 to 0.815 in 2018, and total citations increased from about 900 in 2009 to nearly 2600 in 2018. The 10 most-cited articles (Table 1) have been cited at least 100 times each. Similarly, the 10 most-accessed articles (Table 2) enjoy even more impressive statistics. Article Title Authors Ref. # Citations ConSurf: Using Evolutionary Data to Raise Testable Hypotheses about Protein Function Celniker, Gershon; Nimrod, Guy; Ashkenazy, Haim; Glaser, Fabian; Martz, Eric; Mayrose, Itay; Pupko, Tal; Ben-Tal, Nir 2013, 53, 199–206 210 Deep Inside Cucurbiturils: Physical Properties and Volumes of their Inner Cavity Determine the Hydrophobic Driving Force for Host-Guest Complexation Nau, Werner M.; Florea, Mara; Assaf, Khaleel I. 2011, 51, 559–577 202 The Potential of Cucurbit[n]urils in Drug Delivery Walker, Shonagh; Oun, Rabbab; McInnes, Fiona J.; Wheate, Nial J. 2011, 51, 616–624 175 Electrochemical CO2 Reduction: Recent Advances and Current Trends Jones, John-Paul; Prakash, G. K. Surya; Olah, George A. 2014, 54, 1451–1466 159 JSmol and the Next-Generation Web-Based Representation of 3D Molecular Structure as Applied to Proteopedia Hanson, Robert M.; Prilusky, Jaime; Renjian, Zhou; Nakane, Takanori; Sussman, Joel L. 2013, 53, 207–216 132 How and Why Do Cluster Size, Charge State, and Ligands Affect the Course of Metal-Mediated Gas-Phase Activation of Methane? Schwarz, Helmut 2014. 54, 1413–1431 117 Recent Development on Anodes for Na-Ion Batteries Bommier, Clement; Ji, Xiulei 2015, 55, 486–507 112 Cross-Coupling of C(sp3)-H Bonds with Organometallic Reagents via Pd(II)/Pd(0) Catalysis Wasa, Masayuki; Engle, Keary M.; Yu, Jin-Quan 2010, 50, 605–616 111 Encapsulation of Drug Molecules by Cucurbiturils: Effects on their Chemical Properties in Aqueous Solution Macartney, Donal H. 2011, 51, 600–615 100 Molecular Recognition of Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins by Cucurbit[n]uril Receptors Urbach, Adam R.; Ramalingam, Vijayakumar 2011, 51, 664–678 100 Article Title Authors Ref. Electrochemical CO2 Reduction: Recent Advances and Current Trends John-Paul Jones, G. K. Surya Prakash, George A. Olah 2014, 54, 1451–1466 A Chemical Biology View of Bioactive Small Molecules and a Binder-Based Approach to Connect Biology to Precision Medicines Stuart L. Schreiber 2019, 59, 52–59 The Fluorine Gauche Effect: A Brief History Christian Thiehoff Yannick P. Rey Ryan Gilmour 2017, 57, 92–100 The Emergence and Evolution of Organic Synthesis and Why It is Important to Sustain It as an Advancing Art and Science for Its Own Sake K. C. Nicolaou 2018, 58, 104–113 Dissipative Self-Assembly of Peptides Marta Tena-Solsona, Job Boekhoven 2019, 59, 898–905 Recent Development and Application of Conductive MOFs Pengfei Li, Bo Wang 2018, 58, 1010–1018 Teaching and Learning Electrochemistry Georgios Tsaparlis 2019, 59, 478–492 Issues and Challenges for Bulk-Type All-Solid-State Rechargeable Lithium Batteries using Sulfide Solid Electrolytes Yoon Seok Jung, Dae Yang Oh, Young Jin Nam, Kern Ho Park 2015, 55, 472–485 Chemical Biology: Here to Stay? Christopher T. Walsh 2019, 59, 7–17 Postsynthetic Covalent Modification in Covalent Organic Frameworks Yusran Yusran, Qianrong Fang, Shilun Qiu 2018, 58, 971–984 Beyond the review articles on a specific topic and solicited research papers and communications, we decided to offer our readers additional features, such as conference reports, special coverage of the Wolf Prizes in chemistry, and essays on various topics. A unique initiative has been the “Israeli Showcase”, which exposes Israeli science to the world in the form of reports on university departments of chemistry, research centers, national projects, specific sectors of the chemical industry, etc. Upcoming stories will cover the Israeli peptide chemistry, water desalination and purification, and the chemical aspects of the Beresheet project, which is a $100 million private venture in partnership with the Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., funded mostly by donations and aimed at attracting the young generation to science and technology. The 600-kilogram vehicle, which crashed on the Moon on April 11, 2019, indeed triggered the imagination and enthusiasm of many Israeli youngsters. A particularly exciting feature is the Rosarium Philosophorum (RP) series, which comprises the first issue of every year. Each RP aims at creating an authoritative statement about a specific field in chemistry, its history, strength, benefit to humankind, and its predicted future. Such compilations, which include personal opinions and reflections by thinkers and leaders of the field, have already gained increased interest from a broad readership and have become a powerful reference, not only for scientists, engineers, and corporate researchers, but also for administrators in universities, decision makers of funding agencies, and even journalists and politicians. The first five issues in the RP series were dedicated to Physical Organic Chemistry (2016), Structural Chemistry (2017), Organic Synthesis (2018), Chemical Biology (2019), and now, Macromolecules (2020). The next RP, which will be dedicated to Electrochemistry, is planned for January 2021. I borrowed this name from an old book “Rosarium Philosophorum” (Latin, Rosary of the Philosophers), which was printed in Frankfurt in 1550. The book used the term “rosegarden” as a metaphor for an anthology of wise sayings by alchemists and other philosophers. I have borrowed not only the name, but also the concept that a selected group of thinkers could portray a highly knowledgeable, educated, original, and responsible assessment of the role played by a specific field of science. Accordingly, the contributions to this series are not expected to be typical review articles on a specific body of research, but rather personal, philosophical accounts, expressing thoughts, reflections, and perspectives concerning the specific field. The authors are requested to assess the very broad aspects of the field, describe its historical development, its most significant contributions to science/humankind, explain its conceptual and practical impact on other scientific fields, and even make predictions and speculate about future trends and important open questions. Undoubtedly, the IJC has come a long way in a short period of time and has already secured its stature as a major player in the arena of chemistry journals. The journal is now well-established and highly recognized worldwide, as can be concluded from its very broad, international readership. The growing enthusiasm and confidence in this journal translate to the ready cooperation of guest editors, invited authors, and referees. While taking pride in this journal, I wish to point out that all these achievements have resulted from a group effort of many dedicated individuals, including the guest editors, the well-selected contributing authors and referees, the outstanding group of Israeli scientists who serve on the editorial board,4 and the strong international advisory board, which includes 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Above all, the IJC enjoys a superb publishing house with outstanding sister journals. The work ethics, professional conduct, and friendly atmosphere, which I have been fortunate to experience with the people at Wiley-VCH, have exceeded all my expectations. In particular, I wish to acknowledge Associate Editor, Prof. Charles E. Diesendruck; Managing Editor, Dr. Brian Johnson; and the publishing experts at Wiley-VCH, including Editorial Assistants Josefa Fernández and Lukas Quinn, Production Manager Denis Ott, Marketing Manager Monika Silz, and Marketing Executive Gabriela Kraft. I wish you an enjoyable year of stimulating reading, Ehud Keinan