Oct 31, 2007

Passionate Publisher

Posted in Chemspy at 4:20 pm by chemspy -- 2 Comments; add your comment

My old friend Peter Gölitz this year celebrates a quarter century as Editor-in-Chief of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie. When he took over the editorship of the German Chemical Society’s premier chemistry journal in 1982, there were just four other chemists on the editorial staff and the journal published a mere 1000 pages a year. More than 9 out of 10 papers were from Germany. How things have changed.

Angewandte is now a weekly publication, is available online, and has an annual pagecount of 9000 pages. German authors are still the largest group of contributors, but four out of every five articles
published has an international team member. Oh, and Peter has a little more help these days than he did 25 years ago with 18 PhD chemists and 9 other colleagues helping run the show.

Peter is rather proud of the journal’s ISI impact factor, which ha srisen from a little over a “4″ in 1982 to better than a 10 this year. It’s even surpassed several of its established competitors in this respect. During my New Scientist years, papers from Angewandte featured prominently in my reporting, partly this was because the journal seemed so much more accessible than the heavier grey tomes from other publishers. More than that though, much of the chemistry published seemed to have at least the potential of immediate applications and often flaunted this with an enticing graphic…perfect for pop science.

Congratulations, Peter, and here’s to the next quarter century ;-)

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