Glancing Back at a Successful 2018 and Looking Ahead to the New Year: Our Tribute to ACS Omega’s Authors, Editors, and Reviewers

It has been just over two and a half years since the journal was launched in 2016,^1,2 and ACS Omega is firmly establishing itself as one of the choicest venues for Open Access publishing in the chemical sciences and interfacing areas. While we anticipated growth in all key metrics for the journal, the year 2018 truly surpassed all our expectations. Notably, in 2018, ACS Omega increased published output to 2044, a growth of over 100% compared to 2017 (1008 publications), with a truly global representation of authorship (Figure 1a). This number includes fifteen Perspectives on diverse topics from several prominent authors. We thank each one of the authors who submitted articles to our journal and trust they had a good publishing experience with ACS Omega. The article downloads of our published content approached nearly 1.5 million in 2018 (Figure 1b), reflecting the growing use, appeal, trust in quality, and accessibility of our journal. Importantly the usage profile is made up of an approximately 50%–50% split between ACS institutional subscribers and non-subscribers, emphasizing the value of publishing in our Open Access journal to genuinely reach new audiences.

Figure 1.

(a) The broad geographic distribution of published articles by region in 2018 is shown based upon the country of the corresponding author. (b) The annual usage of published content in ACS Omega since journal inception is shown.

Several published articles were selected as ACS Editors’ Choice (https://pubs.acs.org/editorschoice/) in 2018 or featured extensively on social media and news outlets. We have showcased a selection of some of these articles that reflect the quality (Table 1) and public appeal (Table 2) of content published in ACS Omega in 2018.

Table 1. Articles from ACS Omega with the ACS Editors’ Choice Stamp in 2018.

Title	Author List (*corresponding author)	Citation
Cationic Silver Nanoclusters as Potent Antimicrobials against Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria	Zil-e Huma, Akash Gupta, Ibrahim Javed, Riddha Das, Syed Zajif Hussain, Shazia Mumtaz, Irshad Hussain*, and Vincent M. Rotello*	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (12), 16721–16727
		DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b02438
Label-Free Whole Cell Biosensing for High-Throughput Discovery of Activators and Inhibitors Targeting G Protein-Activated Inwardly Rectifying Potassium Channels	Katrin M. Krebs, Eva M. Pfeil, Katharina Simon, Manuel Grundmann, Felix Häberlein, Oscar M. Bautista-Aguilera, Michael Gütschow, C. David Weaver, Bernd K. Fleischmann, and Evi Kostenis*	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (11), 14814–14823
		DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b02254
Exploring Exercise- and Context-Induced Peptide Changes in Mice by Quantitative Mass Spectrometry	Sarah E. Dowd, Martina L. Mustroph, Elena V. Romanova, Bruce R. Southey, Heinrich Pinardo, Justin S. Rhodes, and Jonathan V. Sweedler*	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (10), 13817–13827
		DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01713
Study of the Degradation and Conservation of Historical Leather Book Covers with Macro Attenuated Total Reflection–Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopic Imaging	Alessandra Vichi, Gayane Eliazyan, and Sergei G. Kazarian*	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (7), 7150–7157
		DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b00773
Detection of Lung Cancer: Concomitant Volatile Organic Compounds and Metabolomic Profiling of Six Cancer Cell Lines of Different Histological Origins	Zhunan Jia, Hui Zhang, Choon Nam Ong*, Abhijeet Patra, Yonghai Lu, Chwee Teck Lim, and Thirumalai Venkatesan*	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (5), 5131–5140
		DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.7b02035
Distance-Matched Tagging Sequence Optimizes Live-Cell Protein Labeling by a Biarsenical Fluorescent Reagent AsCy3_E	Karen A. Hecht, Yijia Xiong, Daniel A. Barrack, Nicole R. Ford, Guritno Roesijadi, and Thomas C. Squier*	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (2), 2104–2110
		DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b00037
Atomically Flat Pt Skin and Striking Enrichment of Co in Underlying Alloy at Pt3Co(111) Single Crystal with Unprecedented Activity for the Oxygen Reduction Reaction	Shun Kobayashi, Makoto Aoki, Mitsuru Wakisaka, Teppei Kawamoto, Ryo Shirasaka, Kohei Suda, Donald A. Tryk, Junji Inukai*, Toshihiro Kondo*, and Hiroyuki Uchida*	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (1), 154–158
		DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.7b01793
E-Cigarette Airflow Rate Modulates Toxicant Profiles and Can Lead to Concerning Levels of Solvent Consumption	Tetiana Korzun, Maryana Lazurko, Ian Munhenzva, Kelley C. Barsanti, Yilin Huang, R. Paul Jensen, Jorge O. Escobedo, Wentai Luo, David H. Peyton, and Robert M. Strongin*	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (1), 30–36
		DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.7b01521

Table 2. Top Five Altmetric Score Manuscripts Published in ACS Omega in 2018.

Altmetric Attention Score	Title and Author List (*corresponding author)	Citation
165	Musical Instruments As Sensors	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (9), 11026–11032
	Heran C. Bhakta, Vamsi K. Choday, and William H. Grover*	DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01673
165	Looking into Limoncello: The Structure of the Italian Liquor Revealed by Small-Angle Neutron Scattering	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (11), 15407–15415
	Leonardo Chiappisi* and Isabelle Grillo	DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01858
160	Determination and Comparison of the Strontium-90 Concentrations in Topsoil of Fukushima Prefecture before and after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (12), 18028–18038
	Mitsuyuki Konno and Yoshitaka Takagai*	DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b02640
111	Exploring Exercise- and Context-Induced Peptide Changes in Mice by Quantitative Mass Spectrometry	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (10), 13817–13827
	Sarah E. Dowd, Martina L. Mustroph, Elena V. Romanova, Bruce R. Southey, Heinrich Pinardo, Justin S. Rhodes, and Jonathan V. Sweedler*	DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01713
74	Amplified Detection of Chemical Warfare Agents Using Two-Dimensional Chemical Potential Gradients	ACS Omega 2018, 3 (11), 14665–14670
	Mohammad A. Ali, Tsung-Han Tsai, and Paul V. Braun*	DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01519

We would like to thank the many editors from our sister journals at ACS Publications who have chosen ACS Omega to publish their work. It is notable that, to date, a total of 35 ACS Editors from 22 different journals have collectively published 54 research papers in our journal. These include articles from Editors-in-Chief: Kirk Schanze (ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces) DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.6b00189, Marc Hillmyer (Macromolecules) DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.6b00284, David Kaplan (ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering) DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.6b00320 and DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01451, Cynthia Burrows (Accounts of Chemical Research) DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01551, Françoise Winnik (Langmuir) DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b02311, Jonathan Sweedler (Analytical Chemistry) DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01713, and Vincent Rotello (Bioconjugate Chemistry) DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b02438. It is also pleasing to note that Jürgen Bajorath, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and winner of the prestigious “ACS Award for Computers in Chemical & Pharmaceutical Research” in 2018, holds the honor as the most published author in ACS Omega since launch with a total of 14 papers.

While published content from ACS Omega was already listed and indexed in all major databases between 2016 and 2017 (e.g., SciFinder, Scopus, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, DOAJ, etc.), the year 2018 saw the journal formally move from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index to the main Science Citation Index Expanded database. This elevation represents another measure of trust and quality in scholarly publishing but is also an indication that the journal will receive its inaugural partial impact factor in the summer of 2019.

Our editorial board saw significant changes in 2018. We substantially expanded our editorial board to allow us to handle the ever-increasing volume of manuscripts received (both de novo as well as transferred) and topical diversity. During 2018, seven eminent scientists from across the globe joined the ACS Omega team as Associate Editors. These include Jesús Jiménez-Barbero (CIC bioGUNE, Spain), Sensuke Ogoshi (Osaka University, Japan), Eriko Takano (University of Manchester, UK), Luisa Torsi (Università di Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy), Jing-Lin Zuo (Nanjing University, China), Johan Hofkens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), and Shaojun Guo (Peking University, China), each with broad and complementary subject expertise. Swagata Dasgupta (IIT Kharagpur, India) will join the editorial team in January 2019, and more Associate Editors will be enlisted in the first quarter of 2019. Likewise, the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal has been expanded to 62 from 18 countries, with 26 new members added in 2018. Finally, three Associate Editors from sister ACS Journals have been actively serving ACS Omega as Advising Editors. We welcome all of our new Associate Editors, Advising Editors, and Editorial Advisory Board members. The end of 2018 also saw two of our inaugural Co-Editors Cornelia Bohne and Luis Liz-Marzán bidding the team farewell, in addition to Senior Managing Editor, Dr. Miranda Paley. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their immense contributions and tireless service in making ACS Omega the success it is today.

A look back at 2018 cannot be complete without acknowledging the vital contributions of our ever-increasing community of voluntary reviewers. In 2018, 5976 unique reviewers from 83 countries worldwide aided us with their analyses of manuscripts submitted to ACS Omega, an increase in number of almost 80% compared with 2017.³ We sincerely thank each reviewer (Supporting Information Table S1) for their care and diligence in aiding us with our decision making and for the role they have played in maintaining the quality of ACS Omega. Due to the timeliness of returned reviews, we have still been able to maintain fast processing times despite the substantial increase in submissions over the past year. Our average time to first decision remains at a highly competitive 25 days.

Over the past year, the team of Co-Editors, Associate Editors, and Managing Editors continued to strive to engage with our community of scientists around the world by seeking feedback, hearing questions and concerns and contributing to the chemistry enterprise. ACS Omega supported and sponsored up to 34 conferences, symposia, and meetings in 2018 including a number of oral and poster prizes to young scientists (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

(a) Prof. Krishna Ganesh presenting poster prizes sponsored by ACS Omega at the 8^th Peptide Engineering Meeting (PEM8-2018), November 8–10, 2018, Berlin, Germany. (b) Prof. Deqing Zhang speaking at the 11^th National Symposium on Electronic Process in Organic Solids organized by the Chinese Chemical Society, October 26–29, 2018, Qingdao, China, where ACS Omega served as a sponsor of the poster prizes.

Looking to the future in 2019, ACS Omega will endeavor to continue to increase its global footprint as well as widen its topical diversity. We are working on editorial strategies and workflows to continue to handle the growing number of submissions, maintaining and even shortening the turnaround time for submitted manuscripts by accelerating decision-making processes. The inclusion of new manuscript types (apart from the existing full-length Research articles and Perspectives) is also in the cards in 2019—for example, the introduction of Minireviews that focus on succinct accounts of rapidly emerging areas, techniques, or processes, in cross-disciplinary research domains. Efforts will also be made to reach out and actively inform the chemistry community of ACS Omega’s published content by providing specially customized highlights. As editors of ACS Omega, we believe that our Open Access journal is best served by being author-friendly, without compromising the quality of published manuscripts, a hallmark of all ACS journals. In closing, we would once again like to thank all our authors and reviewers and look forward to continuing our collaboration into 2019.

Supporting Information Available

The Supporting Information is available free of charge on the ACS Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.9b00058.

• Reviewer list (PDF)

Author Contributions

^# Co-Editor.

Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.