Thank You

Abstract

My term as Editor-in-Chief for Organic Process Research & Development comes to an end in December 2024. I had the great honor to take over this role from Trevor Laird 10 years ago. Trevor had started the journal almost 20 years before and brought it into the family of American Chemical Society journals. The process chemistry community should be grateful to Trevor for having realized the need for a scientific journal covering topics relevant to industrial chemists, often from the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industry. It is fair to say that the journal is doing well. The number and quality of submissions is excellent and overall very interesting to our readership. This is reflected in the number of downloads─we can expect to come close to 2.7 million downloads in 2024, which makes OPR&D one of the most read ACS journals. The process chemistry community can be proud of this fact, as it reflects what we already know: we are doing interesting science at the highest level, and we do this for the ultimate benefit of patients, in the case of pharmaceuticals, or to assure the food supply, in the case of agrochemicals. It is good that our work is also read more widely than just in industry and that academic groups are contributing actively and creatively to our field. I want to thank all the authors who have submitted and published papers with us, something that requires a very high engagement for industrial chemists on top of their “day job” of driving research projects, not forgetting the challenges to obtain the permission to publish. I have tried to be as accommodating as possible to the constraints of industrial scientists, and I hope that we have been able to make the publishing process as smooth as possible. The scientific publishing process hinges on reviewers. The review process is an anonymous activity that is performed without any public recognition but requires commitment and effort. I want to use this opportunity to thank the countless reviewers who have kept the process of the journal going over the last 10 years. Running a journal also requires significant back-office work. OPR&D has been more than fortunate to have been supported all these years by Jelena Vukadinovic. It would have been impossible for me to fulfill the EIC role without Jelena keeping me on track. The journal has had multiple managing editors at the ACS, and my great thanks go to all of them. I want to mention especially Steve Ritter, who retired in May of this year and who made a big difference for the journal by establishing a good working relationship with sister ACS journals. I was fortunate that I could convince Prof. Qilong Shen from the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry to join us as an associate editor (AE) almost 10 years ago. Prof. Shen’s tenure as an AE is also coming to an end in 2024, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to have worked with a such great scientist and person. The other AEs are active scientists from Pfizer and Merck in the U.S. Pamela Tadross worked for several years for us before her career at Merck made it impossible to maintain the time commitment required of an AE. Angela Puchlopek-Dermenci from Pfizer has been a backbone of the journal for 7 years, while Mike DiMaso from Merck has been an AE since 2023. I want to express my gratitude for all the effort invested by the AEs on top of their roles as scientists and managers in their respective companies. The voluntary commitment of this time should be appreciated by the whole process research community. I am proud that we managed to have diverse AEs reflecting the importance of China, Europe, and the U.S. for process chemistry and that OPR&D has thus become a truly global journal, publishing articles submitted in equal parts from all three regions. My 10-year term is over very soon. The ACS process for selection of a new Editor-in-Chief is confidential and does not involve any of the current editors in order to ensure that the journal’s interest is best served. A new Editor-in Chief has been picked for OPR&D and will take over in 2025. Every generational change is an opportunity to bring new ideas and energy to the journal, and I want to wish the new Editor-in-Chief all the best and hope that OPR&D will become even stronger in the future. This article has not yet been cited by other publications.