SECURING A FUTURE FOR CHEMISTRY EDUCATION RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

Abstract

With this issue, CERP completes its fifth volume/fifth year of publication. Its publication has been an experiment which in general can be judged as successful. The quality of papers published has been high, with the result that CERP is widely recognised as a serious, high-quality, interesting and useful journal, publishing educational research reports and research-informed papers on the practice of chemistry education. The success is the consequence of: (i) the quality manuscripts submitted; (ii) the editorial policy; and (iii) the excellent scientists/educators who have been and are involved in the review process. I thank all authors who have submitted manuscripts. Special thanks are due to the established/experienced authors who contributed with invited or reviewed papers. I also thank all those who contributed to the review process. Their expert and timely comments have resulted not only in the proper judgment of manuscripts, but also (for the large majority of manuscripts) in their larger or smaller improvement. Last but not least, I thank the two associate editors, Dr Norman Reid and Dr Keith S. Taber, for their invaluable help both as reviewers of manuscripts and in the running of the journal. I should like to emphasise that we (reviewers, the editor, and associate editors), in CERP, all worked and are working hard to help/encourage new authors to bring their (sometimes initially problematic) manuscripts to a satisfactory publishable standard. Our guiding principle is that “a balance needs to be struck between, on the one hand, maintaining standards, and, on the other hand, providing (especially inexperienced) authors opportunities to be part of the community.” (See also Editorial in May 2000 issue). Needless to add that in many cases, I had to disappoint authors by rejecting manuscripts, or by ‘leading’ them to withdrawing their manuscripts (because of the recommendations for revised manuscripts). Note that there have been (as far as I know) two cases of rejected by CERAPIE/CERP manuscripts which were later published in other well-known journals. Has everything which we envisioned been achieved so far? No! To be honest, one should expect at least an expansion of the journal, with expanding volumes (more pages and more issues per volume). Instead, as can be seen from the data given below, there has been more or less a stable output per volume.