key: cord-0030171-nkkmobb6
authors: Ganesh, Krishna N.; Zhang, Deqing
title: ACS Omega: 2022 Spring Forward, 2021 Look Back
date: 2022-04-06
journal: ACS Omega
DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.2c01984
sha: 4541bd5569d052562abc62d5dfde65ace3450e80
doc_id: 30171
cord_uid: nkkmobb6

ACS Omega has entered its seventh year of publishing since the journal was launched in 2016. We are pleased to present an update and summarize ACS Omega’s new plans and offerings in 2022 and look back and share the key journal statistics from 2021 while featuring some of its excellent published content. We take this opportunity to thank our global pool of reviewers for their continued voluntary and invaluable support in serving the journal and their assistance in maintaining the quality of our published content.

* sı Supporting Information ABSTRACT: ACS Omega has entered its seventh year of publishing since the journal was launched in 2016. We are pleased to present an update and summarize ACS Omega's new plans and offerings in 2022 and look back and share the key journal statistics from 2021 while featuring some of its excellent published content. We take this opportunity to thank our global pool of reviewers for their continued voluntary and invaluable support in serving the journal and their assistance in maintaining the quality of our published content.

We are pleased to welcome our two new Topic Editors, Professor Ekaterina Skorb (ITMO University) and Professor Martina Costa Reis (University of Saõ Paulo) (Figure 1 ), who have joined the ACS Omega team in 2022. The Topic Editors support the journal's Editorial Board in handling a subset of manuscripts in their respective topical areas of expertise. Professor Skorb will manage the peer-review process for manuscripts received in infochemistry, a new research area at the interface of chemistry, biology, and computer science that considers unconventional methods of information processing. In addition, she will assist the Editorial Board in several topics within physical chemistry, encompassing areas of sonochemistry, stimuli-responsive materials, and encapsulation. Professor Martina Costa Reis will lend support to the Editorial Board with her expertise in theoretical physical chemistry, with a focus on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, the mathematical foundations of thermodynamics, thermodynamic modeling, and computational fluid dynamics, with a focus on industrial applications.

In October 2021, we introduced a new manuscript type, called Viewpoint, to allow our authors an avenue to publish general commentaries and tutorials or topics that provide educational insights into research problems of interest to the journal's broad readership. We solicit Viewpoint submissions that express critical scientific analysis or personal views on exciting current topics of interest that include the history of science, chemistry/STEM education, safety, science ethics, policy, funding, etc., to encourage dialogue within the community. More information can be found on our Author Guidelines page here.

In response to feedback from many authors, we have now implemented an option for the publication of full Reviews in 2022. In adding this option, we offer greater flexibility on formatting requirements than our Mini-Review offering, extending submissions of more comprehensive and critical accounts. Reviews that are concise, yet complete literature surveys written by experts for nonexperts will be considered. The purpose is to acquaint readers of ACS Omega with recent progress in emerging fields, including cross-disciplinary areas. They should be written for a more general audience to provide a balanced view of the topic in question. The publication of Mini-Reviews and Perspectives will be continued alongside this new "Review" option. More information can be found here.

If you have a topic that you wish to be considered for publication as a Viewpoint or Review, please get in touch with the Editorial office (managing.editor@omega.acs.org) with a presubmission inquiry. ■ SHOWCASING OUR STRONG LINKS WITH OUR SISTER ACS JOURNALS VIA COPUBLICATION OF VIRTUAL ISSUES Starting in 2021, we ventured to partner with our sister ACS journals on the publication of Virtual Issues. Creating these special collections on selected themes is an excellent way to enhance the focus on key global research trends, challenges, and topics and highlight the strong links among our ACS portfolio of journals. Below, we elaborate on the Virtual Issues ACS Omega participated in and copublished with our sister journals in 2021 and so far in 2022. , with the theme "Sustainable Production to Advance the Circular Economy", this Virtual Issue featured a collection of articles drawn from the nine journals that highlight the progress, remaining challenges, and future research directions across the disciplines covered that will help advance us toward a more sustainable world. The Virtual Issue was introduced by an Editorial in which the journal Editors discussed the impact of the selected articles and commented on areas requiring specific emphasis to facilitate such changes. Finally, in November, ACS Omega joined 32 other journals in the ACS portfolio to publish a Virtual Issue titled "Raising Antimicrobial Awareness" to coincide with World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (November 18−24) and to highlight how antimicrobial resistance remains a persistent and long-term threat to public health and a challenge to modern medicine. The Virtual Issue highlighted important research and advances made in the field over the past few years.

ACS Omega has already been part of three collaborative efforts in the first quarter of 2022 (Figure 2 ; lower panel). In January, it was one of 21 ACS journals to come together and publish a Virtual Issue on "Neglected Tropical Diseases" (NTDs) in support of World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day (January 30) to raise awareness of this group of diseases and showcase recent advances to diagnose, treat, and combat NTDs. In February, ACS Omega copublished a Virtual Issue on a biomaterials theme titled "From Biosensors to Drug Delivery In 2021, ACS Omega published 3,477 articles from researchers in 82 countries across all regions (Figure 3 ). We congratulate and thank our authors for choosing ACS Omega! A selection of some of our best content is presented in Tables 1−4.

Rigorous peer review is the cornerstone of ACS Omega. It enables us as Editors to make carefully considered, wellreasoned decisions. Thanks to our reviewers' voluntary efforts, ACS Omega maintains its standards for the high quality of its published articles. A total of 10,774 unique reviewers from 95 countries returned reviews in 2021. Due to the cooperation of our reviewers, in 2021, the median time to first decision was healthy at 20 days. The Editors would like to extend their gratitude and recognition to all of our reviewers (Supporting Information Table S1 ) for their precious time and dedication. We are delighted to see that ACS Omega continues to attract a growing and diverse readership globally (Figure 4) . Downloads of published articles at ACS Omega snowballed to >7.2 M, a >74% increase over 2020. 1 In 2021, 68% of our readership profile comprised nonsubscribers versus 32% ACS institutional subscribers. A selection of highly read articles (>8,000 views excluding ACS Editors' Choice articles) is presented in Table 1 . The four articles selected for ACS Editors' Choice in 2021 are shown in Table 2 .

ACS Omega published 110 Mini-Reviews and Perspectives in 2021 on a range of topics. A small selection of some noteworthy Mini-Reviews and Perspectives is presented in Table 3 .

Finally, we showcase a selection of articles that received wider public attention online on social and news media, as reflected by their high Altmetric scores (Table 4) .

We hope you enjoy looking through the content featured in this Editorial, and we apologize to the many researchers whose works were worthy of selection but have not been highlighted.

We conclude by congratulating our authors who have published their work in ACS Omega and reiterating our sincere thanks to the referees for their input in reviewing manuscripts. Also, we thank our readers for their support and interest in our journal.

Krishna N. Ganesh, Co-editor orcid.org/0000-0003-2292-643X

Deqing Zhang, Co-editor orcid.org/0000-0002-5709-6088 ■ ASSOCIATED CONTENT

The Supporting Information is available free of charge at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.2c01984. 

Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.

We thank Drs. Paul Goring, Silvia Imberti, Aditi Jain, Jhoan Toro-Mendoza, and Dinesh Soares for providing data and assistance in preparing this Editorial.

(1) Zhang, D.; Ganesh, K. N. Deepening Our Roots and Growing Wings. ACS Omega 2021, 6 (7), 4506−4510.

Shlomo Magdassi, and Alfred Iing Yoong Tok* 143 Evolution of Medieval Gunpowder: Thermodynamic and Combustion Analysis

Oh*, and Jeyoung Park* 91 Physiochemical Properties of Biochar and Activated Carbon from Biomass Residue: Influence of Process Conditions to

Yang 62 Exploring Chemical Reaction Space with Reaction Difference Fingerprints and Parametric t-SNE

Pearlescent Mica-Doped Alginate as a Stable, Vibrant Medium for Two-Dimensional and Three-Dimensional Art

Hutchison 58 Revisiting the Mechanism of Electric Field Sensing in Graphene Devices Afsal Kareekunnan