Environmental Science: Atmospheres is four and so much more

Introduction

Environmental Science: Atmospheres has reached its fourth volume as a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry Environmental Science journal family.

Our publication rate is rising above 100 articles per year. We continue to focus on articles that change the way you think about atmospheres. We continue to host Desktop Seminar webcasts, and we are indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus, and the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index. Environmental Science: Atmospheres 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, Nønne Prisle, and Lin Wang. Our colleague Claudia Mohr has taken over as Director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric Chemistry at the Paul Scherrer Institute (congratulations Claudia!) and so is moving to our Editorial Board from her role as an Associate Editor. Alongside our Associate Editors we have our outstanding editorial staff of the Royal Society of Chemistry and support from guest editors for our themed issues. Our Editorial Board members Dwayne Heard, Joel Thornton, and now Claudia, 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.

Themed collections

We have several mechanisms to draw attention to our papers. We are especially keen on themed collections. These cover urban aerosol formation, brilliant light sources, unmanned aerial platforms, low-cost sensor networks, and indoor air quality, particle levitation and bioaerosols. This set will continue to grow. We also have a growing collection of papers from featured emerging investigators.

Reviewing and outstanding papers

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the community of volunteer reviewers who sustain our essential peer review process. For the most part they work in anonymity, but we are deeply grateful. Furthermore, I want to emphasize how important this whole process is. Yes it plays an important gatekeeping function, at a minimum ensuring that the findings are scientifically justified and original, but also involves evaluating manuscripts against our standard that papers should “change how you think” about important problems. However, I have never written a paper that did not improve substantially in the peer review process. This may reflect the quality of my writing, but I have also never seen a paper in my editorial roles that do not also improve substantially from the first submitted manuscript to the ultimate published paper. We want tough reviews. We aspire to publish all submissions. Of course we cannot; they are not all of sufficient quality or originality. High selectivity per se is not our goal. You should want, and benefit, from these same things.

Conclusion

The world of scientific publishing continues to change rapidly. It is exceptionally important that we carry out our mission with the sole objective of publishing outstanding science from scholars around the world, and ensuring that scholars around the world are able to find a welcoming and important platform for their scholarship. We are only as good as you make us, and so most of all we thank you.

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