PCCP – A Society journal going from strength to strength

Welcome to the first issue of PCCP in 2015! As one year comes to a close and another begins, in this Editorial we will update you with highlights and developments from the past year as well as looking to the year ahead.

PCCP continues to go from strength to strength with continuing increases in both growth and impact reinforcing PCCP's position as a true home for the best research in physical chemistry, chemical physics and biophysical chemistry. Demonstrating this was the fantastic news in the summer of 2014 that the impact factor of PCCP has risen to a new record high of 4.198. This increase in impact has been achieved concurrently with impressive growth in the size of the journal. Fig. 1 shows the growth in published articles over the last 5 years alongside the increases in impact factor.

Fig. 1 Number of articles published in PCCP and impact factor of PCCP over the last five years.

PCCP is a unique collaboration of scientific societies and as such is a true society journal serving a broad community. Increasing submissions are the best indicator that we are serving the community as it demonstrates your trust in us. Most importantly, however, all of this would not be possible without the support of the community. We would like to thank all of our authors, referees, readers and of course our Editorial and Ownership Board Members whose advice and guidance steers the journal. The support of the community makes all of the journal's successes possible and as a Society Journal all surplus is invested back into the science community by the Owner Societies.

We are also delighted that during 2014 we welcomed another Owner Society to PCCP, the Österreichische Physikalische Gesellshaft (Austrian Physical Society). This means that PCCP is now co-owned by 19 scientific societies from across the globe. We are delighted that the Austrian physical chemistry community will now benefit from being a co-owner of this unique journal.

The most important aspect to us of serving the community is focusing on quality. This manifests itself in attention to excellent customer service but also to the quality of the research we publish. PCCP has a hybrid Editorial Office meaning we give you the choice of having your paper handled by professional Publishing Editors in the Cambridge Editorial Office, or by Associate Editors; active researchers who are experts in their field. Whichever Editorial Office you choose, quality is the highest priority. We are delighted to welcome two new Associate Editors to the Editorial Board in 2015, giving you even more choice of Editorial Office. From Spain we are joined by Professor Luis Bañares, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and from Sweden, Professor Bo Albinsson, Chalmers University of Technology.

Our Associate Editors are delivering not just quality but breadth. Fig. 2 demonstrates that PCCP publishes a wide range of topics from across the whole community. Our top downloaded Perspectives (Table 1) give a taster of our most popular content. The breadth of our coverage is also demonstrated in our Themed Issues. Table 2 shows the themed issues published in 2014 and we have an exciting line-up for 2015. We are always interested in themed issue proposals so do get in touch with your ideas.

Fig. 2 Subject area breakdown of PCCP's 2014 published articles.

Table 1 2014 Top downloaded PCCP Perspectives

Title	Authors	Shortened link
Porphyrin-based sensor nanoarchitectonics in diverse physical detection modes	Shinsuke Ishihara, Jan Labuta, Wim Van Rossom, Daisuke Ishikawa, Kosuke Minami, Jonathan P. Hill and Katsuhiko Ariga	http://rsc.li/1tLLK9i
A critical review on lithium–air battery electrolytes	Moran Balaish, Alexander Kraytsberg and Yair Ein-Eli	http://rsc.li/1ufTGEM
Principles of phosphorescent organic light emitting devices	Boris Minaev, Gleb Baryshnikov and Hans Agren	http://rsc.li/1sHSrZF
On global energy scenario, dye-sensitized solar cells and the promise of nanotechnology	K. Govardhan Reddy, T. G. Deepak, G. S. Anjusree, Sara Thomas, Sajini Vadukumpully, K. R. V. Subramanian, Shantikumar V. Nair and A. Sreekumaran Nair	http://rsc.li/1qFlf5i
Key scientific challenges in current rechargeable non-aqueous Li–O2 batteries: experiment and theory	Mahesh Datt Bhatt, Hugh Geaney, Michael Nolan and Colm O'Dwyer	http://rsc.li/1sHXkmy

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Table 2 2014 themed issues and web collections

Themed issue title	Guest Editors	Issue Published
Imaging molecular dynamics	Mike Ashfold and David Parker	2
Astrochemistry	Wendy Brown (University of Sussex)	8
The free energy landscape: from folding to cellular function	Ruth Nussinov and Peter G. Wolynes	14
PCCP's 15th anniversary issue	Editorial Office	21
Photosynthesis: From Natural to Artificial	Johannes Messinger, Wolfgang Lubitz and Jian-Ren Shen	24
Electrocatalysis – Fundamental Insights for Sustainable Energy	Marc T. M. Koper and Yasuhiro Iwasawa	27
Density functional theory and its applications	David Tozer (Durham University, UK) and Michael Peach (Lancaster University, UK)	28
Charge Generation Mechanism in Organic Solar Cells	Alessandro Troisi (University of Warwick) and Maria Antonietta Loi (University of Groningen)	38
High performance computing in the chemistry of materials	Richard Catlow and Scott Woodley (University College London)	39
Fundamental Processes in Semiconductor Nanocrystals	Efrat Lifshitz (Technion, Israel) and Laurens Siebbeles (TU Delft, The Netherlands)	47
Size Selected Clusters and Particles: From Physical Chemistry to Catalysis	Jeroen van Bokhoven (Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering ETH Zurich) and Stefan Vajda (Argonne National Laboratory)	48

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Of course the space for incoming Associate Editors on our Editorial Board is due to the retirement from the Editorial Board of a number of long standing members. Chair of the Editorial Board, Professor Daniella Goldfarb completed her term at the end of 2014. Daniella has been a key member of the PCCP team for a number of years and her advice, support and guidance has been invaluable to the journal. Also retiring are Professor David Nesbitt and Julie McPhearson, who have also served a number of years. Their contributions have been invaluable and they will be sorely missed. Professor Frank Neese also retires from his Associate Editor position and he too has been an invaluable member of the team, handling papers through peer review.

We are delighted that Professor Seong Keun Kim will move from his position as Deputy Chair to become the Chair of the PCCP Editorial Board. Replacing Professor Kim as Deputy Chair is Professor Marie-Paule Pileni. We are very excited about continuing to work with them both in their new roles.

There have also been a few new faces on the Editorial Office team this year, including myself. Many of you will know that Philip Earis has now left the RSC and I would like to thank him for his incredible efforts and success over a number of years, developing PCCP and achieving all this whilst navigating a changing publishing landscape.

I am absolutely delighted to have been appointed as the Editor of PCCP and look forward to working with the community to continue the success of the journal. I have a new Deputy Editor, Ruth Norris, and we will both be attending a number of conferences next year and we look forward to meeting with you to discuss the physical chemistry and chemical physics landscape and how PCCP can serve you. Do look out for details of where we will be on the PCCP blog. We won't just be attending conferences; we are proud to provide sponsorship and contribute poster prizes to conferences to support emerging investigators and students – if you are organising an event please get in touch to see if we can help with prizes and promotion.

I would like to close by thanking my colleagues; there is a whole team of Editorial Staff working hard behind the scenes to deliver a top quality journal in hand with excellent customer service to authors, referees and readers alike. The whole team is pictured in Fig. 3. We are always eager to hear your feedback; please contact us by e-mailing http://pccp-rsc@rsc.org.

Fig. 3 Picture of team. Executive Editor: Anna Simpson (bottom left), Deputy Editor: Ruth Norris (right, first row from bottom), Development Editor: Jessica Cocker (bottom right), Editorial Production Manager: Gisela Scott (bottom, centre), Publishing Assistants: Amy Cook (left, first row from bottom), Helen Prasad (centre, first row from bottom), Publishing Editors (top two rows, left to right): Fiona Gillespie, Dannielle Whittaker, Colin King, Jeremy Allen and Melanie White.

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