Editorial

Abstract

With this current issue, Vol. 14, No. 1–2, January 2017, our journal Plasma Processes & Polymers (PPaP) is now entering the fourteenth year of its existence. Since Volume 11 (2014), PPaP has been appearing as an e-only journal, among a steadily increasing trend in this industry as proportions of subscriptions to printed versions continue to shrink. Fortunately, this has been well accepted by both authors and readers, obvious advantages to both groups being the elimination of charges for color figures that so greatly enhance the appearance and clarity of articles. Below, we shall mostly be citing data pertaining to Vol. 12 (2015) because statistics for 2016 are still incomplete at the time of this writing. In 2015, 232 manuscripts were submitted of which 123 were accepted, resulting in a record number (1469) of published pages. But 2016 promises to be the journal's best year in number of submissions because we fully expect to surpass the 2014 record of 251. The acceptance rate for submitted manuscripts, 53% in 2015, has been roughly constant over the years, between a minimum of 49% and the maximum of 63% ten years ago. Since the year 2011, all articles in Wiley Online Library receive Google specific metadata tagging to allow better extraction of information by Google Scholar. For PPaP, this has led to an enormous boost in the development of full-text downloads, which rose from ca. 80,000 in 2011 to almost 93,500 in 2015. A pie-chart showing the geographic distribution of submissions and downloads for selected countries in 2015 is presented in Figure 1. As can be seen, our current readership is more than 40% from Australasia, 25 to 30% European, 15% from the Americas, with the rest from Russia and African countries. Issues and articles that tended to be most accessed in the course of 2015/16 remained, as before, those related to biomedical applications of plasmas, for example Vol. 7, No. 3/4 (Plasma Medicine), and Vol. 11, No.12 (Plasma and Cancer), but other topics such as Innovative Analytical Techniques for Plasma Polymers, Vol. 12, No. 9, are also receiving great attention. Among other subject areas of special interest to our readership are plasma processes for optics, solar cells and microelectronics; regarding the latter, Professor C. Vallée from France will soon submit a Review Article on Plasma Processing and Moore's Law. Among other noteworthy initiatives, let us underline the following: “Expert Opinions” (“ExOp”), our former “Debates” section, is now re-established. A first paper on Derivatization by C.-P. Klages and S. Kotula appeared in the Vol. 13 (12) issue; several other experts have already signalled their intent to react to it in future pages of PPaP. Plasma-based Decontamination, another topic that can stimulate lively debate, will be the object of the next ExOp in late 2017 or 2018, guest-edited by Professor K.-D. Weltmann (INP, Greifswald, Germany). A series of “White Papers” on future trends in plasma science will also be started with his kind cooperation, six major topics having already been identified, but this too will not likely come into being before 2018. Fast-track Communications that we introduced to encourage authors to submit short reports of high novelty, a mechanism that can guarantee appearance on “Early View” within 30 days, are still regrettably not being used as much as foreseen and hoped. We redraw our readers’ attention to this feature and re-encourage them to benefit from it. By the way, may we point out the New Article Design, introduced in 2016, one that is characterized by a more streamlined layout, less typesetting errors, and shorter publication times. With a 2015 impact factor (I.F.) of 2.718 PPaP ranks among the best of journals specializing in plasma processing science. Finally, we wish to sincerely thank members of PPaP's International Advisory Board (IAB) who left us in 2016, Professor Jae Koo Lee (Pohang, S. Korea) and Dr. Mark Strobel (St. Paul, USA), for their years of dedicated service to this journal! At the same time, we welcome our new IAB members Eun-Ha Choi (Seoul, Korea), Yuichi Setsuhara (Osaka, Japan), Rony Snyders (Mons, Belgium), Luc Stafford (Montreal, Canada), and Ai-Min Zhu (Dalian, China). In closing this Editorial, we proudly underline that our journal is as always open to suggestions from its readership on any topic of general interest; for example, we welcome suggestions of themes for Special Issues, Expert Opinions, or White Papers which in selected cases can be linked to workshops or special symposia on hot topics. For more details about Plasma Processes & Polymers, go to www.plasma-polymers.org. Riccardo d'Agostino Pietro Favia Christian Oehr Michael R. Wertheimer Editors in Chief Renate Foerch Managing Editor December 10th, 2016