MaterialsViews.com’s professional scientific editors scan the materials science, chemistry, and physics literature, looking for the most interesting, exciting, and relevant breakthroughs in all of materials science as soon as they are published. They then distill the best papers into concise summaries that can be quickly scanned so busy scientists can identify the papers they want to spend more time reading.

Finding articles is faster on the new MaterialsViews.com, with improved navigation and layout. New individual channels for hot subject areas–including nanotechnology, polymers, energy, electronics, photonics, surfaces, and more–let scientists focus on the stories most relevant to their research.

“Scientists could spend so much time reading papers relevant to their research that they wouldn’t have time for anything else, so we updated the site to make it even easier to find key results.” said Adrian Miller, editor of MaterialsViews.com. “And, once you find something interesting, we want you to be able to process it quickly and decide whether you want to invest more time reading the original paper.”

It’s also easier to find upcoming events and conferences, and the new MaterialsViews.com jobs page can help locate the perfect career opportunity anywhere in the world.

For more information and to receive weekly updates on the latest in materials science, visit MaterialsViews.com.

The following position is currently available:

As an Trainee Editor for the journal Advanced Materials you will gain on-the-job experience in many different aspects of publishing, such as the acquisition and development of journal content (both print and online), peer-review procedures, editing, proofreading, coordination of freelance work, and contact with authors and referees from all over the world.

Applicants for these positions should have a broad interest in chemistry/materials science/physics, be self-motivated, have excellent organizational and communication skills (written and verbal), be diplomatic, flexible, familiar with text and graphics computer applications, and have an excellent command of the English language. Fluency in German and previous publishing experience would be advantageous.

The Editorial Office is based at WILEY-VCH in Weinheim, a pleasant small town near Heidelberg in southwest Germany. Applicants should send their full CV with a covering letter describing their suitability for the post to:

WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA
Human Resources
Christiane Rabe
Boschstrasse 12
69469 Weinheim
Germany
E-mail: CRabe@wiley-vch.de

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Beijing, Shanghai; China – December 1, 2009 — John Wiley & Sons, Inc., (NYSE:JWa) (NYSE:JWb), has launched the Chinese version of its Materials Views website.

MaterialsViewsChina.com is a dedicated news service for materials science, chemistry, and physics in Chinese and is a specially tailored companion to the popular English service MaterialsViews.com. It will provide high quality original content selected and written by professional editors and will be updated regularly. The website is aimed at Chinese-speaking researchers, scientists, and students in industry and academia across the world.

About one-third of the papers published in some of Wiley’s top materials science journals – including Advanced Materials – originate from China. Chinese submissions have been increasing at an exponential rate, and coupled with a very strong Chinese readership of MaterialsViews.com, the Wiley editorial team decided to build a site that would reach the Chinese community in their language. The newly launched site will feature a mix of translated MaterialsViews.com content and original articles from Chinese researchers and scientists.

David Flanagan of MaterialsViews.com said, “The journey we took to build this site has been a truly global one. We based MaterialsViewsChina.com on the site model of the original MaterialsViews.com housed in Europe, while collaborating very closely with our Chinese partners and contributors to localize content as well as to provide in-depth original papers.”

Mingxin Hou of MaterialsViewsChina.com added, “Our aim moving forward is to work closely with the research community in China. The launch of the site reflects Wiley’s continued commitment to bringing the best of Wiley’s material science to China and China’s top scientific research to a global audience.”

Regular contributor to the MaterialsViewsChina.com site, Professor Limin Qi from Peking University’s Department of Chemistry said, “We are thrilled that Wiley has decided to launch the local language version of MaterialsViews.com, and even more excited that this site will feature original content from the Chinese research community.  This initiative will be instrumental in providing greater exposure to researchers and scientists in China, hence supporting our strategy of raising the quality of China’s research output.”

MaterialsViewsChina.com will be rolling out new features over the next few months, including fresh content, more in-depth articles, an author services space dedicated to guiding younger authors looking to publish their first paper in an international journal, as well as video capabilities.

Scientific publishing increasingly relies on online web publication as more and more people access the online version of their favorite journals. But what would happen if a journal went offline, ending access to thousands of articles?

Without a backup, the electronic assets of a journal (the PDFs, supporting information, HTML) would be lost forever, which librarians obviously don’t want. On the other hand, publishers and societies want access to be through their site, so competing freely accessible backups are obviously out of the question. CLOCKSS is an interesting compromise where archives are maintained, but they remain dark until the board votes to “flip the switch” and make the content freely accessible in the event of a natural disaster (electromagnetic pulse from the sun) or man-made catastrophe (“um, what backup tapes?”).

Read my complete article at MaterialsViews.com.

What else should publishers and librarians be doing to preserve the digital record? And what do you do to back up your own digital assets? (I use Time Machine myself.) Let me know in the comments!

For more Cover Stories from top materials science journals, be sure to check out Lisa Wylie’s materiaLisam blog and follow her on Twitter.

Proteins are arguably one of the most important things on earth. In the shape of enzymes, they catalyze biochemical reactions in the body. They act as the principal actuators in your cells. They provide physical structure and mechanical support to cellular matter, are responsible for cell signaling and signal transduction, and are capable of recognizing and binding other molecules to them. On a larger scale, in forms like collagen and elastin, they are the building blocks of connective tissue such as cartilage, and harder filamentous tissue such as hair and nails.  In short, we can’t really do without them.

As a material, then, proteins are tremendously versatile, with potential (and already realized) applications in tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, sensors, bioMEMS, and neural engineering, to name but a few. Part of the attraction is their tendency to self-assemble into ordered, predictable structures, and it’s this tendency that leads to the idea being explored by Silke Behrens, Oded Shoseyov and their teams in Karlsruhe and Rehovot: using proteins as a self-assembling template for metal  nanoparticles. The resulting biohybrids combine the properties of the inorganic component (perhaps magnetic, optical or catalytic activity) and those of the organic one (such as molecular recognition). Kind of like a nanoscale cyborg, and the structured nature of the protein assembly makes sure the particle size is pretty consistent.

One stumbling block in previous attempts to use proteins as biotemplates has been that they are quite sensitive to their environment, and subtle shifts in temperature, acidity and the other chemicals present can cause the assembly to fail. In this paper, the team overcame this hurdle by using “stressed” proteins produced by aspen plants under drought conditions, which are much more robust and can cope with fluctuations in their environment. They managed to create complexes of proteins and palladium nanoparticles of roughly 3 nm diameter. The Pd particles are catalytically active, and when the complexes were used in a sensing test, the catalyzed reaction causes an amplification in detection signal. From this basic reaction, there is huge scope to refine the system by using different proteins and nanoparticle types to produce complexes capable of specific tasks like imaging of cancer cells, site-specific drug delivery, or toxin/pollution sensing.

Proteins are versatile, proteins are essential to life, proteins are great cover image candidates. The structural models always look beautiful, have a certain sense of mystery (they’re so completely different to any other kind of molecular model) and can be pretty mesmerizing (go on, you try following one strand from start to finish). In this cover, the contrast between the cool blue and the warm yellow shows up the organic/inorganic divide very nicely, and the white glow lifts the focus of the image away from the background.  The blue–green gradient of the background as a bit of dynamism, and the subtle microscopy image of the real-life complexes just adds enough texture to keep it from feeling 2D. To avoid deviating too much from the colour scheme and upsetting the balance, I followed the author’s lead and mimicked the blue and white glow. A great piece of research, and a top piece of scientific art!

DOI: 10.1002/adma.200900487

What would you have done differently with this cover? Leave a comment! Or, if you have questions about preparing images or art for your paper, get an expert’s opinion and ask Lisa in the Materials Forum!

The program combines supramolecular chemistry and organic electronics:

SUPERIOR aims at providing top-quality cross-disciplinary and supra-sectoral training to a pool of promising young researchers, in an area at the interface between Supramolecular Chemistry, Materials- and Nano-Science, Physics and Electrical Engineering. SUPERIOR is designed to generate new scientific and technological knowledge by combining supramolecularly-engineered nanostructured materials (SENMs), mostly based on organic semiconductors, with tailor-made interfaces to solid substrates and electrodes, for fabricating prototypes of optoelectronic devices. We are particularly interested in developing multiscale SENMs for transistors (FETs), in-plane diodes single-photon emitters, and especially solar cells (PVDs) and organic light-emitting diodes, OLEDs.

A number of top labs are participating, including those of Paolo Samorì , Richard Friend, Klaus Müllen, Stefano Prato, Jérôme Cornil, and Alan Rowan. They are looking to fill the openings by 1 November.

For more information on these openings, see www.superior-network.eu.

If you’re looking for a materials science job, be sure to check out Materials Jobs for the latest listings.

At Advanced Functional Materials, we use the EuCheMS Ethical Guidelines for Publication in Journals and Reviews for guidance in publishing ethics cases. These guidelines state:

There is no universally agreed definition of authorship.

Hmm, not a good start, especially if you were looking for a definitive answer. However, it goes on:

As a minimum, authors should take responsibility for a particular section of the study. The award of authorship should balance intellectual contributions to the conception, design, analysis and writing of the study against the collection of data and other routine work. If there is no task that can reasonably be attributed to a particular individual, then that individual should not be credited with authorship.

In other words, everything in the paper had to be done by one of the authors, and each of the authors had to do something in the paper. This can be contrasted with guest authorship and ghost authorship:

• A guest author is incorrectly listed on a paper when they have made no contribution to the paper, either intellectual or by performing more routine work.
• A ghost author is incorrectly not listed on a paper when some contribution cannot be attributed to one of the listed authors.

Naturally, there are some controversies around these definitions. Should the head of an institute, who provided the funding—perhaps a critical factor in the paper’s success—be listed as a author, even if they did not contribute to the design or execution of the research?

In contrast, inventorship on a patent application can be strictly defined, as in US patent law, or more loosely, as in other systems.¹ The US Manual of Patent Examining Procedure states

Unless a person contributes to the conception of the invention, he is not an inventor… Insofar as defining an inventor is concerned, reduction to practice, per se, is irrelevant.

In other words, if you ran the experiments but didn’t contribute to the intellectual development of the invention, you’re not an inventor. A patent could be invalidated if successfully challenged because the listed inventors are incomplete or otherwise incorrect.

Back to the case of journals, and Advanced Functional Materials in particular: it is the corresponding author’s responsibility to provide a correct and complete list of co-authors on the manuscript. If changes are made to the co-authors, the corresponding author should have the consent of all the co-authors. Some journals request or require a list of author contributions to be published with the paper, but Advanced Functional Materials does not currently require this extra documentation.

Do you have expertise on the definitions of inventorship in patent frameworks outside the US? Do you think that all journals should include a list of author contributions to prevent guest or ghost authorship? Leave a comment!

Do you have questions about authorship while you’re preparing your manuscript? Ask an editor in the Materials Forum!

1. I am not a lawyer, and this is in no way intended to convey legal advice.

If you’re interested in learning more about solar cell characterization, check out this Advanced Functional Materials paper by Yang Yang, Keith Emery et al. entitled “Accurate measurement and characterization of organic solar cells“.

In their manuscript, “The impact factor’s Matthew effect: a natural experiment in bibliometrics,” released August 21st on the arXiv, Vincent Larivière and Yves Gingras, both at the University of Quebec in Montreal analyzed 4,532 pairs of identical papers published in two different journals.  By comparing identical papers, the authors were able to control for article quality and focus on the citation effect of the journal. Their approach is no different than measuring the effect of environment on human development when identical twins are raised in separate households.Philip Davis under The Scholarly Kitchen, Aug 2009

The authors found statistically significant differences in citation rates of the papers published in lower and higher impact factor journals in biomedical research, chemistry, clinical medicine, engineering and technology, physics, and social sciences.

What’s unusual and surprising about this study is that the authors were able to find so many manuscripts that met their criteria for duplicate publication (having the exact same title, the same first author, and the same number of references). While there may have been some false positives, as the authors concede, the existence of 4,500 pairs of papers is disconcerting. The only consolation may be that the advent of text searching and projects like Deja Vu makes duplicate publication more detectable than in the past—at least, after publication.

Are you a materials scientist, chemist, or physicist looking for a job? Then check out the new materialsdave.com Materials Jobs page, where you can find the latest materials science jobs in both industry and academia.

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