A Multitude of Physics in Annalen der Physik

Abstract

2017 has been a great year for physics. Almost everybody will certainly remember the advent of multimessenger astronomy as one of the key events. This entirely new research approach in astrophysics was largely triggered by the achievements of the LIGO Scientific and VIRGO Collaborations and their (by now) series of gravitational wave observations. The basic physics behind the first detected binary black hole merger coded as GW150914 was explained in their article.1 It is the very first article in Annalen der Physik with a thousand authors that even made it into the scientific background document2 published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to justify the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 awarded to our authors Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne. So, congratulations again from the AdP Editorial Office and we look forward to many more exciting as well as gradually more “routine” findings! Overall, the last year has been quite successful for AdP as we have seen more diverse and qualitatively better submissions, and we have been able to strongly increase (almost double) our output. So it seems that five years after the launch of the ‘New Annalen’3 word of mouth is spreading more widely and the journal is again being recognized as a major player in general physics publications. Here, clearly our series of 14 special issues have played a key role, so let's briefly look back on these. The recent issue Science and Technology of Graphene,4 edited by Thomas Seyller, provides an overview on the progress in this research field which was funded in Germany as a Priority Programme. Evidently, as activities on graphene and other 2D materials continue on a large scale around the world, this is highly relevant and will raise considerable attention. Moreover, we are particularly proud of having published the “phone book-heavy” (if still seen in print) Special Issue Many-Body Localization,5 edited by Jens H. Bardarson, Frank Pollmann, Ulrich Schneider and Shivaji Sondhi, with 11 Review/Feature Articles and 20 Rapid Research Letters/Original Papers giving a broad status update on this intense physics topic. Out of these articles, Web of Science has now classified 3 as ‘Hot Papers’ (ranging among the top 0.1% of papers in physics) and 5 as ‘Highly Cited Papers’ (top 1%). Altogether the special issue contributions have already been cited 128 times to date. Now, new tasks, challenges and changes are ahead of us. So what's in store for the New Year? After 219 years of continuous printing, 2018 sees the end of an era, namely that of routinely produced journal hardcopies in the fast-paced internet age. Without change, AdP remains of course available online at www.ann-phys.org, and we also continue to offer printed editions on request. Consequently there are also no color charges anymore. In this respect, we recommend that our readers make greater use of the HTML online version of our articles. The ‘Anywhere Article’ has enhanced functionality in comparison to the traditional print-related PDF format. It provides readers with a much clearer article overview also on mobile devices and extra features, such as a clickable table of contents for easy navigation, linked bibliographic citations and scalable figures that can even be downloaded in Powerpoint format. HTML is also less prone to copyright violations, allows for counting access rates and thus, helps your librarian to decide on future holdings of important content. As before, the main task of our guest editors is to work out the concept of a special issue and to support AdP in the author invitation phase while the time-consuming handling of submissions, organization of the peer-review and technical editing process stays in the hands of the professional editors at Wiley. Together with me, our team is now comprised of peer-review editors Maria E. Stournara (Berlin), Huan Wang (Beijing) (handed over from Matteo Cavalleri, Hoboken) and technical editor James Cook (Weinheim, taking over from Julia Hübner, Berlin). Finally, if you have not already done so, we encourage you to register on ORCID (www.orcid.org) to obtain your own Open Researcher and Contributor ID. In the digital age, the ORCID ID is a persistent identifier which uniquely connects you to your research. Therefore, it will become mandatory for submissions to all our journals soon. We thank all our authors, editors, advisors and reviewers for their dedication and work done in 2017 and look forward to further and new cooperation this year.