Happy 25th Anniversary, EurJOC!

Abstract

EurJOC turns 25! In this Editorial, editors Anne Nijs and Leana Travaglini celebrate this anniversary and look forward to continuing EurJOC's role as your publishing partner in organic chemistry! 2023 marks the 25th anniversary of the European Journal of Organic Chemistry: A journal From Europe to the World that publishes high-quality international research covering all aspects of organic chemistry. Traditionally known as an organic synthesis journal, EurJOC broadened its scope over the years and now publishes topics ranging from synthetic methods, total synthesis, and mechanistic studies to (bio-)catalysis, bioorganic chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, and organic materials. EurJOC, together with its inorganic counterpart EurJIC, was launched in 1998 as a merger of several national European society journals. The vision was to create high-quality European journals focusing on the two core disciplines in chemistry – organic and inorganic chemistry – with both published in English. The merger had its start already one year earlier when a GDCh (Germany) and KNCV (Netherlands) cooperation joined their national journals to form interim titles. Soon after, eight European national chemical society journals stemming from France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, and Poland joined (Table 1), and in 1998 the first volumes of EurJOC (Figure 1) and EurJIC were published. The amalgamation of more European national chemical society journals followed and this initiative was consolidated under the ownership of ChemPubSoc Europe, recently re-branded as Chemistry Europe. EurJOC is fully owned by Chemistry Europe, which collaborates with Wiley-VCH as their publishing partner. Journal Title National Chemical Society Liebigs Annalen, Chemische Berichte[a] GDCh(Germany) Recueil des Travaux Chimiques des Pays-Bas[a] KNCV (Netherlands) Bulletin des Sociétés Chimiques Belges SRC, KVCV (Belgium) Bulletin de la Société Chimique de France SCF (France) Gazzetta Chimica Italiana SCI (Italy) Anales de Química RSEQ (Spain) Chimika Chronika EEX (Greece) Revista Portuguesa de Química SPQ (Portugal) ACH – Models in Chemistry MKE (Hungary) Polish Journal of Chemistry PTC (Poland) Front cover of EurJOC's first issue (January 1998). At the outset, EurJOC was steered by the editors of the individual society journals, with Klaus Hafner at the helm (see the recent collection in his memory). The rapid growth and success of the journal necessitated the formation of an Editorial Board as well as the appointment of an Editor-in-Chief. Henning Hopf served as the first Chairman of the journal. In 2003, Haymo Ross took the rein as the Editor-in-Chief of EurJOC and, under his leadership, the journal continued to develop into the successful journal that it is today. In 2018, the 20th anniversary year of EurJOC, Anne Nijs took over as Editor-in-Chief of the journal. EurJOC continues to have strong ties with its European owner societies, yet during the last two-and-a-half decades, the journal has become truly international and publishes research from all over the world! Mirroring the global reach of EurJOC, the in-house editorial team has also become more international with team members in Weinheim, Berlin, Shanghai, and Delhi. Currently, the EurJOC editorial team is composed of Editor Anne Nijs and Deputy Editor Leana Travaglini, as well as Associate Editors Junting Chen, Khushbu Kushwaha, and Lara Schulz (Figure 2). We are professional editors that are employed by the publisher and work full-time for the journal; we are not affiliated with any universities or funding bodies. Our different backgrounds and expertise in (organic) chemistry (see our Contact page) allow us to effectively manage the broad range of submissions to EurJOC. During the peer review process – as highly trained scientists – we strive to evaluate the scientific merit of each submission in an unbiased manner, of course, with the dedicated support of reviewers! Other tasks, such as post-production, manuscript acquisition and promotion, or journal strategy, are distributed amongst the team members. The editorial team is supported by Editorial Assistant Patrizia Vierheller who helps keep the journal administration running. Ursula Lerch, Technical Assistant, who worked for many years for both EurJOC and EurJIC, retired at the end of 2022. Ursula, you played an important role in the journal‘s continued success, we will miss you! The EurJOC in-house editorial team. Top, from left: Leana Travaglini, Anne Nijs. Bottom, from left: Lara Schulz, Junting Chen, and Khushbu Kushwaha. The unique nature of the in-house editorial service at EurJOC and other Chemistry Europe titles allows us to dedicate most of our work day to interact with our authors and readers throughout the entire publishing process. We see ourselves as your publishing partner in organic chemistry, at the interface of the society owners, our board members, and you, our authors and readers! EurJOC is particularly proud of the many ongoing collaborations with its European owner societies, and in particular with their respective organic divisions. Over the past 5 years, we have regularly teamed up with the organic divisions of the French Chemical Society (DCO-SCF), the Italian Chemical Society (DCO-SCI), the Royal Spanish Chemical Society (GEQOR-RSEQ), and the German Chemical Society (Liebig Vereinigung-GDCh). Various joint initiatives included prizewinner collections highlighting the national award winners, virtual symposia (e. g., the EurJOC−GEQOR Symposium and the Journée d'Automne DCO – if you missed it, you are still on time to watch its recording), and sponsored lectures and awards at national meetings. We enjoy working closely with the societies and their divisions and strongly believe that, as the European Journal of Organic Chemistry, it is our mission to support the Chemistry Europe member societies. We are happy to see that these fruitful collaborations have also led to a stronger bond between EurJOC and the societies, and we would like to thank the boards of the divisions for their openness to work together. This raised awareness pays off: Owner societies receive royalty payments when researchers from their respective country publish their work in EurJOC. In addition, we have established a growing partnership with the Organic Chemistry Division of EuChemS for the annual Young Investigator Workshop. In the years to come, EurJOC is keen to extend its collaborations to our other European partner societies! Although our roots are based in Europe, EurJOC has a broad international author- and readership. In 2021, although around 50 % of articles in EurJOC were from Europe, more than a third of published papers were from Asian researchers! China, France, Germany, India, and Italy topped the list as country of origin for EurJOC articles (Figure 3). National distribution of published articles in EurJOC′s in 2021. Data were taken from Editorial Manager, EurJOC's online submission system. A highlight in 2022 was the partnership with guest editors Braulio Rodriguez-Molina (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), María A. Fernández-Herrera (Cinvestav Unidad Mérida), Gloria Serra (Universidad de la República), and Ronaldo Pilli (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) for a collection showcasing organic and supramolecular chemistry in Latin America. Together with our sister journals ChemMedChem, ChemBioChem, and ChemistrySelect, we published a joint collection featuring biomedical research in Africa, in collaboration with guest editors: Princessa Chellan (Stellenbosch University), Temitope O. Olomola (Obafemi Awolowo University), Adrienne Edkins (Rhodes University), Clinton G. L. Veale (University of KwaZulu-Natal). For the first time, EurJOC organized collections to highlight the importance of organic chemistry research in industry; we published a special issue celebrating the 30th anniversary of Enamine Ltd., which was guest edited by Oleksandr O. Grygorenko (University of Kyiv). A collection of articles in collaboration with guest editors Carl Nising (Bayer AG) and Franz von Nussbaum (Nuvisan ICB GmbH) focused on organic chemistry in the life science industry. Aligned with Chemistry Europe's mission to support its members at every stage of their careers, we are highlighting young researchers on the rise in our #NextGenOrgChem collection; this next generation of researchers was nominated by our Editorial and Advisory Board Members. A current special collection is also dedicated to young talents in China working in the field of organic chemistry. The international nature of EurJOC is also reflected by our Advisory Board, which consists of 61 representatives – at various career stages – from 32 countries, who actively participate in content acquisition and advise on journal strategy. On this note, we welcome our first international member to the EurJOC Editorial Board, Feng Shi from Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China (Figure 4). Feng, we look forward to closely working with you in this new role! Overall, the current composition of the board, with a broad range of member expertises, is well matched to EurJOC's scope! New Editorial Board Member Feng Shi (Jiangsu Normal University). Burkhard König (EurJOC Chair): “Happy 25th Birthday EurJOC! Turning 25 is a great time in life. You are still young but mature enough to have your own value proposition and you do not need to follow any fashion and hype anymore. I have been with the journal for over a decade and there are three aspects I particularly like: 1) EurJOC is a value-driven journal. All stages of the publishing process, reviewing, acceptance, production, are fair, transparent, scientific, and polite. This is not natural in today's rapidly changing and highly competitive publishing business. 2) The journal does a great service to its owner societies, the European Chemical Societies. In addition to being the safe harbor of high-quality scientific results, it serves as a platform to interact in virtual symposia and promote the best young scientists with awards. 3) Publishing is a people's business, and the journal is only as good as the people running it. The EurJOC editors put all their effort into the unbiased selection of the best submissions and make them even better by peer review and editing. A big thank you to the EurJOC editorial team for the extra mile they go on every working day for many years to fulfill the mission of the journal. EurJOC, enjoy your roaring twenties! I look forward to your next decades as a trustful companion of organic chemistry in Europe and the world.” Over the past 25 years, the publishing landscape and, with it, the journal have undergone many changes, the most apparent being the print-to-fully online transition. With digitalization and the broader accessibility of research, the number and frequency of publications have changed tremendously. However, EurJOC was able to keep up and fulfill the needs and demands of the community by steadily adjusting and improving workflows – for both pre- and post-acceptance – implementing new submission systems, and making research more visible. Open Science, and in this regard, Open Access publishing, has become increasingly important over the past decade. Many institutions and funders mandate researchers to publish open access. EurJOC offers authors a hybrid Open Access option and the many transformational agreements between Wiley and various funding bodies allow published articles to be freely available to the public. In 2021, more than a quarter of articles in EurJOC were published Open Access. EurJOC is also a strong advocate of the growing trend to make primary data freely available (Open Data), and new community and publisher-based databanks are evolving to support this endeavor. Preprint servers, in particular ChemRxiv, have seen increased growth within the field of chemistry research. Wiley, among many other major publishers, allows the submission of preprint articles to EurJOC. EurJOC strives to play a pivotal role in the Open Science movement in the years to come! Social media has become a valuable tool in the scientific publishing world: Individual researchers and research groups, as well as societies, journals, and publishers, promote their content and activities through, for example, Twitter. @EurJOC joined Twitter in 2016 and its reach has now grown to more than 13 000 followers; our editorial team takes pleasure in updating our followers with posts on new EurJOC scientific content and special issues as well as conference highlights. On WeChat, editor Junting Chen keeps our Chinese readership up-to-date. Follow us on Twitter or WeChat to not miss any of our articles, as well as upcoming anniversary activities! We are proud to be among the first journals to establish a regular virtual symposia series, which allowed the EurJOC community to interact on a broad range of topics in organic chemistry. During the past three years, these virtual events have been well received and allowed an audience from all over the world to tap into talks from renowned international researchers. Stay tuned for more symposia to come! The publishing world is in constant flux. We at EurJOC are committed to progress with the times to provide our authors and readers with the service they need in this changing environment. Let's drive Open Science forward together while continuing to tap into existing and yet-to-be-developed platforms for virtual interaction! Organic chemistry is a core discipline in life science research, and its position at the interfaces of biology, medicine, data science, and other disciplines offers tremendous opportunities for new collaborations that address future challenges and enable innovations. In this context, EurJOC is committed to supporting the global organic chemistry community in the dissemination of its research findings. EurJOC will continue to be your forum for innovative and high-quality international organic chemistry research within the Chemistry Europe journal family. We welcome articles reporting new developments as well as improved methodologies that are of interest to the general organic chemistry community. The editorial team will continue to ensure a fair and timely peer review process for all authors by adhering to the highest publication standards and ethical guidelines, shown on the website, as well as following procedures established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). We will also keep doing our best to provide you with a great publishing experience at EurJOC, supporting you from submission to the promotion of your research or review-type article! With an emphasis on diversity – among authors, editors, and peer reviewers – EurJOC, on this 25th anniversary, is looking to the future by further strengthening its role in supporting and collaborating with the entire organic chemistry community! We would like to thank all our authors, peer reviewers, board members, and guest editors, who have supported EurJOC over the past 25 years – you have played an instrumental role in developing EurJOC into the international, high-quality journal that it is today! A big thank you to the current and past editorial team members of EurJOC, whose work has been vital in keeping the journal running. We have planned several initiatives for the upcoming year and hope to see many of you at conferences throughout the year to celebrate 25 years of EurJOC! Enjoy our 2023 issues of EurJOC, starting with issue 1 (Figure 5)! Front cover of EurJOC issue 1/2023. The cover was designed by Ella Maru Studio. All the best, Anne, Leana, and the EurJOC team