Happy Times for the Macromolecular Journals

Abstract

Let's start the new year with some good news that we know a lot of you have been waiting for: from January 2018, there will no longer be color charges for any of the Macro­molecular Journals. We are looking forward to your colorful submissions! Speaking of submissions, we have seen a strong overall growth of 20% across all Macro­molecular journals over the last two years. This trend supports our moves to put more man-power into the Macromolecular titles and so, to further strengthen our poly­mer program, David Huesmann and Anne Pfisterer have been promoted to deputy editors for the whole Macromolecular family. You already know Anne as the editor responsible for Macromolecular Bioscience, and David from his work on Macromolecular Materials and Engineering. They will now play a bigger role in the whole Macromolecular family, supporting Mara Staffilani with Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics and further developing the family flagship Macromolecular Rapid Communications. In addition, we can count on the help of Bo Weng from our Beijing office and Christine Mayer with her expertise in bio-related topics and, of course, Stefan Spiegel remains in charge of our specialized titles Macromolecular Reaction Engineering and Macromolecular Theory and Simulations. Unfortunately, Szymon Wiktorowicz' responsibilities have shifted with the success of his other projects, resulting in his move away from peer-review to take a lead role in Advanced Science News and the development of video content. Although he will be missed a lot, we are sure he will continue to support the team wherever possible in his new role. For Macromolecular Materials and Engineering specifically, 2017 has been another successful year. We were able to again increase our impact factor to 2.86, the highest value in the history of the journal. Table 1 features our Top 5 downloaded papers in 2017, including a communication by Christoph Weder from our first issue of 2017, which has already been cited 11 times. We also published a special issue with Luana Persano, Andrea Camposeo, and Dario Pisignano on Electrospinning and Functional Nanofibers. The issue was highly praised for its great content as well as its beautiful cover by I.-D. Kim and D. Pisignano, which you can see in the middle of Figure 1 (mame.201600569). Our other two favorite covers represent the articles Mechanically Robust, Tough, and Self-Recoverable Hydrogels with Molecularly Engineered Fully Flexible Crosslinking Structure by H. Zhuo and W. Chen (Figure 1, left) mame.201700085 and Design and Fabrication of Fibrous Nanomaterials Using Pull Spinning by K. K. Parker, (Figure 1, right), mame.201600404. We would like to thank our readers, authors, reviewers, and board members for their continued support, and we are looking forward to a colorful 2018.