This first issue of 2018 is the appropriate time to inform our readers about some few changes we had in our editorial board. The first one is that from now on I become the coordinator of the editors (editor in chief) replacing our efficient, hard worker and friend Dr Watson Loh, who has kept this position for several years. The Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society (JBCS) on behalf of the Brazilian Chemical Society acknowledges Dr Loh for his work in the coordination of the editors of the journal. During his term JBCS has experienced some changes and of special importance was to become full Open Access. This change has introduced the page charge for the journal what affected the number of submissions somewhat negatively, decreasing the number of papers, however, more importantly, not influencing in the quality of the journal. Other changes in the editorial board refer to our new collaborator, associate editor, Fernando Carlos Giacomelli, who is now in charge mainly of the physical chemistry manuscripts. This has led Dr José Walkimar M. Carneiro to position of editor. In the total, the editorial board counts with one editor (in-chief), 05 editors and 11 associate editors. These changes have been accompanied by a new suggestion from PubliSBQ that the editors of the journals of the Brazilian Chemical Society should have defined terms, with the possibility to be reappointed. For the JBCS our suggestion is a 3-year term. This new experience is intended to have a more dynamic change of editors, therefore for all the present editors and the ones starting soon there is a clear time period ahead.
The year of 2017 marked the transition to full Open Access system that started in the mid of 2016, with the requirement that all authors of the JBCS should contribute with page charges in order to meet the financial demand to maintain the Publishing Office and the journals of the Brazilian Chemical Society. This transition implied in the decreasing of submission of papers, however, it is clear for us that the worst is gone once it happened in 2016. From our statistics we had 40% decrease in submission last year, however, we can see that this has been changing and we are having a rise again in this number. On the other hand, the introduction of page charge has given us some extra budget what, in addition to providing more funds to the journal, diminished the amount of funds invested by the society. The aim is to be completely sustainable in few years.
As mentioned previously we had a drop in the submission of papers after becoming full Open Access; however, a close inspection on the numbers allows noticing that this was mostly due to the submissions from other countries. This suggests that this change has affected more the foreigner authors than Brazilians.
On the other hand, it seems that the Brazilian chemical community has been more receptive to this new system and continue to submit their papers to the JBCS. It should be considered that the members of the Brazilian Chemical Society have considerable discounts in the fees when publishing in the JBCS.
In our last year editorial11 Loh, W.; Vieira, P. C.; J. Braz. Chem. Soc. 2017, 28, 1. we raised a point related to the trend of decrease in the JBCS impact factor, as measured by Thomson-Reuters, however, the 2016 impact factor released in 2017 seems to indicate that this trend is no longer valid, and actually what we saw was an increase in the impact factor. Accompanying now the citations during 2017, our expectations are that we will have another increase in the impact factor for 2017. This is a good news and we will be working hardly with all the editors to keep this new trend. For being successful in this task an especial effort is expected from all the editors and more importantly we would very much wish that the authors continue trusting the journal by submitting good papers for publication here. Only with good papers and good editorial practices we will consolidate the JBCS among the best journals in chemistry in the world. As we finished the editorial last year, we call the attention of our colleagues to have JBCS as their journal of choice for publishing their best results.
Paulo Cezar Vieira
Departamento de Química
Universidade Federal de São Carlos
São Carlos-SP, Brazil
Editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society
Reference
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1Loh, W.; Vieira, P. C.; J. Braz. Chem. Soc 2017, 28, 1.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jan 2018
