Environmental Science: Atmospheres five years on

Introduction

Environmental Science: Atmospheres has reached our fifth volume as a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry Environmental Science journal family. When we were a new journal we spake as a child, but now we have put away childish things. We publish about 100 excellent articles per year, and we shall always focus on articles that change the way you think about atmospheres. 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, including our Associate Editors: Tzung-May Fu, Stephen Klippenstein, Nønne Prisle, and Lin Wang, and our editorial team, with support from guest editors for our themed issues, and the outstanding editorial staff of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Along with Editorial Board members Dwayne Heard, Joel Thornton and Claudia Mohr, 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.

Themed collections

We have several mechanisms to draw attention to our papers. We are especially keen on themed collections. These span a wide range of topics: Urban Aerosol Formation; Brilliant Light Sources; Unmanned Aerial Platforms; Low-cost Sensor Networks; Indoor Air Quality; Particle Levitation; Bioaerosols; and Peroxy Radicals in the Atmosphere. This set will continue to grow. When the topic of a conference is appropriate, we will publish a collection of papers derived from presentations at that conference, such as the 2022 Air Sensors International Conference included in the Low-cost Sensor Network collection. 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, while also 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 does not also improve substantially from the first submitted manuscript to the ultimate published paper. We want tough reviews. We also want to publish all the manuscripts we receive; high selectivity per se is not our goal. You should want, and benefit, from these same things.

Conclusion

We all share the atmosphere, and there is still much we do not understand about it. Innovations in instrumentation, methodology, and computation all continue to spark major changes in our understanding of this fascinating and vital system, and our goal is to be a conduit for those advances, shared worldwide. I want to hear from you about how we can fulfil that mission, and most of all I want to see your outstanding manuscripts continue to fill our pages.

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