Reflecting on Nanoscale Horizons in 2024

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Abstract

The Nanoscale Horizons Editorial Board and Editorial Office reflect on the exciting events, activities and updates from the journal in 2024 and look forward to celebrating 10 years since the journal was inaugurated in 2025.

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As we come to the end of 2024 and begin our 10th anniversary celebrations in 2025, we look back at some of the exciting activities, events and updates from Nanoscale Horizons over the past year. But first, we would like to recognise the wonderful nano community for their continued support and engagement with the journal. Thank you to all of our authors, reviewers, readers, board members and other community members, old and new! We look forward to celebrating with you as we reach our 10-year milestone in 2025.

New Editorial Board members

2024 saw the addition of Prof. Xiaohui Qiu, NCNST, China and Prof. Mark MacLachlan, University of British Columbia, Canada (Fig. 1) to the Editorial Board of Nanoscale Horizons as Scientific Editors, bringing with them expertise on optical, electrical and quantum properties of nanomaterials, and synthesis, photonics, self-assembly and supramolecular chemistry, respectively. Sadly, we did have to say goodbye to Scientific Editors Anna Fontcuberta i Morral, Zhiyong Tang, Miqin Zhang and Dirk Guldi (Fig. 2), and we thank them for their support of the journal over the years. We continue to work with them as they join our Advisory Board.

Fig. 1 Welcoming new Scientific Editors Prof. Xiaohui Qiu (left) and Prof. Mark MacLachlan (right).

Fig. 2 Thank you to our former Editorial Board members Anna Fontcuberta i Morral, Zhiyong Tang, Miqin Zhang and Dirk Guldi (from left to right).

Celebratory post-publication collections

Nanoscale Horizons celebrated various international days and events in the form of post-publication collections, to showcase impactful research in line with these days.

To mark International Women's Day 2024, we once again highlighted some of the inspiring women researchers publishing in the nanoscale journal family in our post-publication collection celebrating women in nanoscience. This collection showcased just some of the publications from women scientists around the world in Nanoscale Horizons, Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances published in 2023. We were delighted to feature over 60 publications from women all over the world and to support the visibility of impactful research led by women researchers.

World Cancer Day was celebrated in early February and Nanoscale Horizons was involved in a post-publication collection featuring a selection of cancer-related research from various journals across the RSC. Understanding cancer and developing effective treatments and diagnostics is widely researched across the world and we are proud to play a part in disseminating such important research.

The nanoscale journal family celebrated Lunar New Year with a collection highlighting some of the most popular articles published in 2023 by corresponding authors based in countries and regions celebrating the year of the dragon. We look forward to celebrating the year of the snake and showcasing more impactful research from our authors in 2025!

Outstanding Paper Awards

Our annual Outstanding Paper Awards recognise some of the outstanding work published in the journal and highlights the authors behind the articles. Earlier in 2024, we were delighted to announce the winners of our 2023 outstanding paper awards. Congratulations to Takuya Iida and team, Yujeong Bae and team, and Jinyou Shao and team for being selected as this year's recipients. With the high calibre of 2023 articles published in the journal, it was a difficult selection process for our Editorial and Advisory Boards, but we think the authors and papers chosen were well-deserving of the awards. You can find out more about our outstanding papers and authors in this editorial.

Outstanding reviewers

Every one of our peer reviewers makes a significant contribution to great science and each year we are pleased to recognise just some of the peer reviewers who have gone above and beyond. We were delighted to recognise significant contributions from some of our outstanding reviewers for Nanoscale Horizons in 2023 who have really dedicated their time to providing detailed, constructive and timely reviews, helping to uphold the high peer review standards of the journal. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our reviewers for their continued support to ensure the standards of Nanoscale Horizons publications are maintained, and for taking the time to provide constructive feedback on submissions to the journal.

Emerging Investigator Series

Our Emerging Investigator Series showcases exceptional primary research published by independent researchers in the early stages of their career, typically within 10 years of their PhD. The series was inaugurated towards the end of 2022 and has continued to grow in 2024 (Fig. 3). So far, we have showcased 14 corresponding authors through an interview-style Editorial published in the journal. We are pleased that early-career researchers choose to publish their work with us and look forward to receiving more outstanding articles in 2025. If you would like to be considered to feature as an Emerging Investigator in one of our 2025 issues, find out more about the eligibility criteria and selection process in this editorial.

Fig. 3 Nanoscale Horizons Emerging Investigators featured in 2024. From left (top): Pengzhan Sun, Valentina Castagnola and Mohammad Malakooti. From left (bottom): Baisheng Sa, Leslie Schoop and Mita Dasog.

Themed collections

The nanoscale journal family has a collaborative venture with the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) and to celebrate this institution reaching its milestone 20th year at the end of 2023, we promoted a special cross-journal collection highlighting the breadth of high-quality work of the Center, featuring work from researchers currently affiliated with NCNST, esteemed alumni, and researchers with strong connections and extensive collaborations with the institute.

With key developments in artificial intelligence algorithms, machine learning and advanced computing, Nanoscale Horizons and Materials Horizons promoted a themed collection on Memristors and Neuromorphic Systems earlier in the year, guest edited by Prof. Xiaodong Chen (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Prof. Cheol Seong Hwang (Seoul National University, Korea), Prof. Francesca Santoro (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany) and Prof. Yoeri Van de Burgt (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands). We were delighted to publish some really exciting and impactful research and reflections from key members of the community in this important research area and encourage you to check out the full collection.

Community Board Picks and collections

We have worked with our Community Board to put together a collection of ‘Community Board Picks’, which are published on our blogs platform and as Editorials in the journal. Community Board members select a recent article published in the journal and write a short summary of the work, highlighting some of the recent and exciting advances in nanoscience. We have also promoted a Community Board collection on new trends in energy storage and harvesting selected by Materials Horizons Community Board member Edison Huixiang Ang and Nanoscale Horizons Community Board member Satyajit Ratha (Fig. 4), highlighting some of the most recent research and reviews on the topic of energy published across the Horizons journals. We look forward to expanding our ‘Community Board Picks’ collection in 2025 and to promoting more of our Community Board members and their expertise through their post-publication collections.

Fig. 4 Materials Horizons Community Board member Edison Huixiang Ang (left) and Nanoscale Horizons Community Board member Satyajit Ratha (right) guest edited a Horizons Community Board collection.

Horizons symposium

Nanoscale Horizons and Materials Horizons held a Horizons symposium on polymers at the human interface at the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing, China from 19–20 November 2024 (Fig. 5 and 6). The symposium showcased a wide variety of cutting-edge work at the intersection of polymers and polymer nanoparticles with the human body, including sensors, wearable technologies and biomedical applications and we were pleased to see many of our board members getting involved and giving talks. What a truly successful event and we thank everyone that attended!

Fig. 5 Delegates and speakers gathered outside the NCNST for the Horizons symposium.

Fig. 6 Panel discussion chaired by Martina Stenzel with Guoping Chen, Wenlong Cheng and Yoshiko Miura.

Our Editorial Board also held their annual meeting to discuss the journal strategy and ideas for the upcoming year, including celebratory activities for the journal 10th anniversary. Many fruitful discussions were had with our Editorial Board and some of our Editorial Office coming together in person in Beijing and online (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7 Members of the Nanoscale Horizons Editorial Board and Editorial Office after the Editorial Board meeting. From left to right: Zhiyuan Zhu, Guoping Chen, Xiaohui Qiu, Heather Montgomery, Katharina Landfester, Michaela Muehlberg, Wenlong Cheng and Man Yang.

Personal achievements, successes and highlights from our Editorial Board Chair

Editorial Board Chair, Katharina Landfester, reflects on another productive year for the journal and personally. 2024 marked the 40th anniversary of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research where Katharina has been based since 2008 and she enjoyed taking part in the celebrations. Katharina also enjoyed some travel in 2024 with personal highlights including a retreat on a sailing boat in the Baltic Sea with her group and attending symposia in China and Thailand after more than 5 years! We were also delighted to hear that Katharina was awarded a Liebig medal from the German Chemical Society (GDCh) and a Liesegang award from the Germany Colloid Society (Fig. 8 and 9), recognising her outstanding achievements in research. These awards are certainly most deserved. Katharina is looking forward to celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Nanoscale Horizons in 2025.

Fig. 8 Congratulations to Editorial Board Chair Katharina Landester for receiving the Liebig Medal from the German Chemical Society. Photo credits to Mika Fotografie, Berlin.

Fig. 9 Another congratulations to Katharina Landfester for being awarded the Liesegang award of the German Colloid Society. Photo credits to IPF, Dresden.

2025 celebratory activities

We are excited to be celebrating 10 years since the inauguration of Nanoscale Horizons in 2025 and plan to launch a series of initiatives and activities to celebrate this milestone. We invite our community to get involved in joining us! As part of the celebrations, we plan to promote an invited anniversary themed collection, invite our inaugural authors who published when the journal was first launched to reflect on their first Nanoscale Horizons publication in a series of ‘Reflection articles’, encourage our cover authors to add a ‘10’ to their cover artwork, and perform interviews with some of our dedicated community members such as board members, guest editors and authors. Stay tuned for the launch of our anniversary celebrations and keep up to date with our activities by signing up to our newsletters and following us on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/rscnano/?viewAsMember=true) and on X (https://x.com/nanoscale_rsc).

We look forward to seeing what the next year brings and thank our wonderful community for their continued support!

Katharina Landfester, Editorial Board Chair

Katsuhiko Ariga, Scientific Editor

Wenlong Cheng, Scientific Editor

Miaofang Chi, Editorial Board Member

Yves Dufrêne, Scientific Editor

Mark MacLachlan, Scientific Editor

Jin-Hong Park, Editorial Board Member

Xiaohui Qiu, Scientific Editor

Jinlan Wang, Scientific Editor

Michaela Mühlberg, Executive Editor

Heather Montgomery, Managing Editor

Natalie Cotterell, Development Editor

Tiffany Rogers, Development Editor

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