ChemistryOpen Appoints New Editor-in-Chief

ChemPubSoc Europe and Wiley-VCH have named Dr. Kate Lawrence as Editor-in-Chief of ChemistryOpen, succeeding Dr. Karen Hindson and Dr. Haymo Ross per July 1, 2017. The appointment was confirmed at a recent meeting between the owners of ChemistryOpen (the national chemical societies from Europe allied in the ChemPubSoc Europe organization) and Wiley-VCH.

Kate Lawrence completed her Master’s degree in Chemistry for Drug Discovery and Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Bath, UK, supervised by Frank Marken and Tony James. She also spent some time with the group of Jianzhang Zhao at the State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals, Dalian University of Technology, China. Her main research focus was on the synthesis and functionalization of carbon nanoparticles for fluorescence and electrochemical sensing applications.

Kate joined Wiley-VCH in January 2013 and has worked for ChemPubSoc Europe journals ChemSusChem, ChemPhysChem, ChemElectroChem, and ChemistryOpen in various roles. She retains her position as Deputy Editor of ChemElectroChem while also becoming Editor-in-Chief of ChemistryOpen.

ChemViews talked to Kate about her promotion.

What fascinates you about the idea of the journal?

Open-access publishing is becoming increasingly fundamental in the realm of scientific research. Research funders and institutions around the world are setting more stringent rules regarding the open-access publication of work that they have funded. There are significant benefits of open-access publishing, both to the author and the reader, owing to the free and immediate availability of the article to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

ChemistryOpen was the very first society-owned, fully open access, general chemistry journal, which is co-owned and supported by ChemPubSoc Europe. ChemistryOpen also proudly adheres to balanced and high-quality peer review that enables the publication of some great articles, making this an extremely interesting and diverse journal to work on.

What is in store for the near future for ChemistryOpen?

There have already been a number of recent changes at ChemistryOpen. Most notably, we have reduced the article publication charge (APC) from 2500 € for Full Papers and Communications and 3500 € for Reviews and Minireviews to a flat fee of 1800 € for all article types. We are pleased that this will be in effect at least until August 2018 and hopefully even beyond then.

Another key change on the horizon is to increase the number of issues that we publish per year. Since the first volume in 2012, the journal has published six issues per year, but now we are encouraged by increasing submissions and have decided to have monthly issues, publishing 12 issues per volume as of January 2018.