Energy & Environmental Science: a continuing success story

Welcome to the first issue of Energy & Environmental Science in 2015. Energy & Environmental Science is going from strength to strength and we were delighted earlier this year to achieve a spectacular increase in impact factor to 15.49. The journal is now clearly fulfilling its founding aims of being a community-spanning home and forum for researchers investigating a more energy-sustainable planet.

Energy & Environmental Science is the leading home for exceptional and insightful energy research; we believe that true progress requires collaboration and as such aim to facilitate the cross-fertilisation of new ideas across traditional subject boundaries. The journal's scope is intentionally broad, we welcome work across the (bio)chemical, (bio)physical and chemical engineering disciplines covering all aspects of energy conversion and storage, alternative fuel technologies, and the science of environmental impacts and mitigation that are related to energy conversion processes, such as global atmospheric science, climate change, carbon capture and environmental catalysis. The broad range of research which Energy & Environmental Science publishes is unique, and can be seen both in this current issue and in the list of most-read reviews in 2014 shown in Table 1.

Table 1 2014 Top downloaded Energy & Environmental Science review content

Title	Authors	Shortened link
A review of graphene and graphene oxide sponge: material synthesis and applications to energy and the environment	Victor Chabot, Drew Higgins, Aiping Yu, Xingcheng Xiao, Zhongwei Chen and Jiujun Zhang	http://rsc.li/11l6UFu
Progress in flexible lithium batteries and future prospects	Guangmin Zhou, Feng Li and Hui-Ming Cheng	http://rsc.li/1sIib8b
Organohalide lead perovskites for photovoltaic applications	Peng Gao, Michael Grätzel and Mohammad K. Nazeeruddin	http://rsc.li/1wXk33f
Visible light driven photocatalysis mediated via ligand-to-metal charge transfer (LMCT): an alternative approach to solar activation of titania	Guan Zhang, Gonu Kim and Wonyong Choi	http://rsc.li/1wsqE1u
Capacitive energy storage in micro-scale devices: recent advances in design and fabrication of micro-supercapacitors	Majid Beidaghi and Yury Gogotsi	http://rsc.li/1qFvwyi

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In view of our wide readership, each article in the journal continues to be accompanied by a brief distinctive “broader context” section, highlighting the importance of the research and allowing the entire readership to appreciate its significance.

None of this would be possible without the support of our authors, referees, readers and especially our Editorial and Advisory Board Members. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support and for putting your trust in Energy & Environmental Science. The support of the broad community that we serve makes all the journal's successes possible and as a Society journal any surplus we make is invested back into the scientific community.

I would like to close by highlighting the constant emphasis we have on quality which, we believe, is behind the success of Energy & Environmental Science. This is most obviously manifested by only publishing research of exceptional quality and impact; our rejection rate now stands at well over 90%, ensuring we continue to be a highly selective home for the top 5% of research in the field. We also, however, pride ourselves on quality of customer service and this is something we will be working even harder on in 2015. Customer service means many things, but most importantly having a rigorous, fair and transparent peer review process and ensuring authors are kept fully informed.

Ensuring this is possible is a team of Editorial staff working hard to deliver a top quality journal and the whole team is pictured in Fig. 1. Many of you will know that the Founding Editor Philip Earis left the RSC earlier this year and you can hear from him in his Editorial (http://rsc.li/1ygZiis). However, I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his exceptional dedication, over and above, to developing Energy & Environmental Science in to the excellent Journal it is today.

Fig. 1 The Energy & Environmental Science team.

I am absolutely delighted to have been appointed as the Editor of Energy & Environmental Science and look forward to working with the international research community to continue the success of the journal. My Deputy Editor, Ruth Norris, and I will both be attending a number of conferences next year and we look forward to meeting you to discuss the energy landscape and how Energy & Environmental Science can serve you. Do look out for details of where we will be on the 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.

We are always eager to hear your feedback so please contact us by emailing E-mail: ees-rsc@rsc.org. On behalf of the whole Energy & Environmental Science team we wish you all the best for the year ahead.

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