Environmental Science: Atmospheres at year two

At Environmental Science: Atmospheres we are starting our third volume as a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry Environmental Science journal family.

Our founding aspiration was for each of our articles to change the way you think about atmospheres. I believe we have accomplished this. Articles are well written, present new science, and are being read. Submissions have risen steadily, and issue sizes are rising in parallel. We published more than 100 articles this year and expect that number to continue to rise. We continue to host Desktop Seminar webcasts, and we are indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus, and in the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Clarivate. Our journal is gold open access, and so all of our articles are free for scholars world-wide.

Our core subject is the atmosphere, but “environmental” emphasizes the connections between the atmosphere and other biogeochemical reservoirs, including the ocean, the biosphere, and the land surface. Natural and anthropogenic emissions, and the consequences of atmospheric transport and chemistry to deposition and human exposure are all in our scope. This includes indoor emissions, transformation, and exposure as well as interactions between outdoor and indoor air.

Our team

We have an outstanding team of Associate Editors: Tzung-May Fu, Stephen Klippenstein, Claudia Mohr, Nønne Prisle, and Lin Wang. They continue to guide manuscripts through submission and review, along with support from guest editors for our themed issues, along with the outstanding editorial staff of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Along with Editorial Board members Dwayne Heard and Joel Thornton, they continue to provide strategic perspective as well. We continue to aspire to a rigorous but smooth review process. We also provide options for both private and transparent peer review; nearly half of our authors have opted for transparent peer review, which provides a permanent and public record of the review process as part of the supplementary information to published papers.

Themed issues and topics

We have several mechanisms to draw attention to our papers. Themed issues have been especially successful, and we shall continue to emphasize them. We have covered brilliant light sources, urban aerosol formation, bioaerosols, low-cost sensor networks, unmanned aerial platforms, particle levitation, and indoor air quality; this last theme in collaboration with Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts. Our Emerging Investigator themed collection continues to grow, and we will host a session at the upcoming American Chemical Society Spring 2023 Meeting featuring many of our highlighted authors.

Conclusion

Our goal is to foster environmental science around the world that relates to the atmosphere. We all breathe, and we are all influenced by the atmosphere in many ways. The atmosphere also obviously obeys the same set of governing equations and chemical mechanisms everywhere, but with wildly varying conditions. It is as diverse as we all are, and as important to us everywhere. We strive to play our small role in building a world-wide community of scholars reporting world-changing research in this fascinating field. Until we are three.

---