JBCS 30^th Anniversary

Three decades have gone by since the launching of the Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society (JBCS) by the Brazilian Chemical Society (SBQ). In his first editorial,¹ the JBCS founding editor, Eduardo Motta Alves Peixoto, delivered the message: "Our mission and our commitment are to the present and future generations, safeguarding the prosperity and welfare of the world with the best in the chemical research. Not just a new international journal." The SBQ has worked hardly to keep this mission and to deliver the best in terms of quality of the JBCS.

However, during its 30 years of existence, JBCS has faced several challenges and much effort has been put to overcome the difficulties. Since beginning one of the main challenges was to publish a scientific journal in English. A large majority of our journal authors have not English as their mother language making the process a more complicated task. Fortunately, several services for English corrections have appeared in the past few years to help to overcome this problem.

Another challenge arises from the instability of the scientific funding in Brazil that chemistry community has faced in different occasions in the past 30 years. This fact has directly impacted not only in the submission of papers by the Brazilian authors but also in the sustainability of the journal, once we have depended pretty much on the financial support of governmental funding agencies. This dependency has changed quite significantly when we began the full open access process with the introduction of page charge. This new procedure, in the beginning created a negative impact in the submission of papers but almost two years later we are secure that the authors have comprehended the necessity to pay fees to avoid the risk of our journal financial collapse.

It is interesting to mention some of the initiatives taken by the editors along the years that certainly were important to give more visibility to the published papers and confidence to authors of JBCS. Some of them that I would like to highlight were: (i) the recognition of JBCS by Capes in its Qualis platform as a high standard journal (A2); (ii) the acceptance of our journal in the SciELO/FAPESP databases; (iii) the introduction of DOI in the forthcoming papers; (iv) the use of the ScholarOne® platform for manuscript submission; (v) the creation of the PubliSBQ for the management of the SBQ journals; (vi) to have the entire collection available online; (vii) to publish 20-25 papers monthly, (viii) the utilization of iThenticate tool, detection service to prevent plagiarism in published papers; (ix) the publication of thematic numbers, as well as, more recently, the virtual thematic collections; (x) lastly the program of seminars to disseminate the importance and challenges to publish a chemistry journal in Brazil, and to invite especially the students of the graduate programs in chemistry to publish their papers in the JBCS. There are other key points that helped the journal to be more visible, among them the indexation in several databases like: Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded (SciSearch), ISI Alerting Services, Chemistry Citation Index, Current Contents/Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences, Chemical Abstracts - Caplus and SciELO. With these initiatives, JBCS has provided the authors with more efficiency in the publications, more visibility of the published papers, to search for scientific excellence for, in the end, to give to the chemistry community the feeling that the choice to publish their papers in our journal would be the best for a wide exposition of their research.

All these decisions certainly impacted positively to make a better journal, however, we still have challenges regarding the citation of our papers and consequently the impact factor of JBCS, even though the journal experienced a considerable increase in the IF from 2016 to 2017.

We have been trying to implement a dynamic system to handle the editing of our journal and one initiative we believe to be of fundamental importance is the periodical change of the editors. As we have been announcing almost every year, starting in 2019 we have some changes in the board of editors. The editors Adriano L. Monteiro and Solange Cadore are leaving to be replaced by Teodoro S. Kaufman and Eduardo Carasek da Rocha, both former associate editors. The associate editor Marília O. F. Goulart has been replaced by Rodrigo Muñoz, and Ivo Milton Raimundo Júnior is starting as associate editor. We very much appreciate the work of the editors who are leaving now for their wonderful job and welcome the new associate editors expecting they will help JBCS to achieve its goals.

The overall balance at this moment is that we have been successful with the goal of having a good journal and this has only been possible due to the contribution of many actors like: authors, reviewers, editors, editorial office, financing agencies, among others, and certainly the Brazilian Chemical Society (SBQ) who has made an unbelievable effort to keep the journal. JBCS is kind to acknowledge all the support received from different sources over 30 years of activity.

As part of our 30 years anniversary celebration, the board of editors have decided to launch a special number in honor to the Brazilian women working on chemistry in Brazil who have devoted their lives to the growth and dissemination of chemistry knowledge. We are very kind to accept papers from all of those who are willing to participate of this celebration. So, let us do it in great style!! Cheers!!

Paulo Cezar Vieira
Editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society
Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Ribeirão Preto-SP, Brazil

Reference

• ¹
  Peixoto, E. M. A.; J. Braz. Chem. Soc. 1990, 1, 1.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan 2019