Annual Reports

ACS324.1 JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY EDITORIAL BOARD - 2017 Annual Report

JEQ Editorial Board Meeting: Oct 25, Wednesday, 10-12 pm Wednesday, Marriott Hotel, Room #6

Managing Editor's Report—Ann Edahl

See attached file below

Editor’s Report – Ed Gregorich

Editorial Board Update

The Associate Editors listed below will complete their second terms at the end of the 2017. They have provided excellent oversight of manuscript reviews and conducted comprehensive reviews. The Technical Editors and I thank them for their hard wor

K. Xia

B. Chefetz

C.W. Riddle

K. Spokas

A. Townsend-Small

S.J. Del Grosso

J.J. Beaulieu

Y. Ouyang

C. Rossi

G. Koopmans

M.S. Reiter

M. Stutter

T.Q. Zhang

S.D. Young

T. Punshon

JEQ Best Paper Award

This is the third year for this award which was established to recognize outstanding scientific papers published in JEQ in the last five years. A panel comprising the Technical Editors and me reviewed and evaluated a number of papers. We selected the best paper in terms of how the manuscript has advanced knowledge in environmental science, the effectiveness of communication, originality, and the scientific impact as measured by number of citations and downloads. There are two categories for JEQ Best Paper: Technical Report and Reviews and Analyses.

JEQ Best Paper – Technical Report

Simple Biotoxicity Tests for Evaluation of Carbonaceous Soil Additives: Establishment and Reproducibility of Four Test Procedures (2012; vol. 41:1023-1032)

Daniela Busch, Claudia Kammann, Ludger Grünhage and Christoph Müller

JEQ Best Paper – Reviews & Analyses

Environmental Challenges Threatening the Growth of Urban Agriculture in the United States (2013; 42:1283-1294)

Sam E. Wortman and Sarah Taylor Lovell

A formal announcement was made at the Publishing Reception on Sunday, Oct 22, at 8:30–9:15 PM, in the Tampa Convention Center, Room 1

JEQ 2016 Editor’s Choice Awards

Stephen del Grosso

Colorado State University

Fort Collins, CO

Lisa Durso

USDA-ARS

Agroecosystem Management Research Unit

Lincoln, NE

Jim Ippolito

Dept of Soil & Crop Sciences

Colorado State University

Fort Collins, CO 

Cole Green

USDOI BLM

Salt Lake City, UT

Doug Smith

USDA-ARS

Grassland, Soil and Water Research

Temple, TX

Sophie Uchimiya

USDA-ARS-SRRC

New Orleans, LA

Steve Blecker

CDFA-Office of Pesticide Consultation & Analysis

Davis, CA

Gerhard Soja

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH

Tulln, Austria

Mark Liebig

USDA-ARS

Mandan, ND 

JEQ’s impact factor

The journal’s impact factor has increased from last year and ranks JEQ 89^th out of 229 environmental science journals.

JEQ Impact Factor (2012-2016)

5-year Impact Factor

2016: 2.986 (77/229) top 33%

2015: 2.924 (71 of 225)

2014: 2.972 (60 of 223)

2013: 2.694 (73 of 215)

Analysis of submissions

Submissions and acceptance rate of manuscripts submitted to JEQ (2012-2017)

Average review times of JEQ manuscripts (2011-2017)

Summary of papers by category to show trends in current topics

Number of papers published in each subject matter category (2012-2017)

‡ Previously “Heavy Metals in the Environment.”

Special Collections of Papers in JEQ (2011-2017)

2017: 2 with 31 papers (tentative)

2016: 5 with 71 papers

2015: 4 with 57 papers

2014: 4 with 56 papers

2013: 1 with 6 papers

2012: 5 with 63 papers

Special Collections of Papers Published in 2017

1) Synchrotron Radiation-based Methods for Environmental Biogeochemistry (expected November 2017) (Ganga M. Hettiarachchi, Erica Donner, Emmanuel Doelsch) 11 papers

2) The Evolving Science of Phosphorus Site Assessment (expected November 2017) (Peter Kleinman, Zach Easton, John A. Lory, Deanna Osmond, Nathan Nelson, David Radcliffe, Andrew Sharpley) 18–20 papers

3) Environmental Indicators (expected January 2018) (Tiequan Zhang) 4–5 papers

Expected Special Collections:

• Predicting Soil Organic Carbon in Agroecosystems under Climate Change

Editors: Hero Gollany, Richard Farrell, Maria Villamil

• Microbial water quality:  monitoring and modeling

Editors: Yakov Pachepsky, Laurie Boithias, Kyunghwa Cho, Robert Jamieson Ana Prieto Allende

• Soil Chemistry and the One Health Initiative

Editors: Tsutomu Ohno, Ganga M. Hettiarachchi

• Buffer Strip Effectiveness for Sediment and Nutrient retention, Enhancing Biodiversity, Planning and Public Preferences

Editors: Marc Stutter, Brian Kronvang and Joachim Rozemeijer

• How can we improve our estimates of indirect N2O emissions?

Editor: Rod Venterea

Developing new special collections of papers

Some of the most highly cited/downloaded papers in JEQ are in special collections; hence they are important to the journal. I encourage you to consider suggesting or leading the organization of a special collection, especially if you are participating in or attending a scientific meeting, symposium or workshop in your area of expertise. Please forward your ideas and suggestions to me.

Increasing the visibility and promoting JEQ articles

Improving the visibility of JEQ articles will raise awareness of environmental science and our scientific disciplines. Science Communications Editor Laura Christianson is in charge of overseeing which JEQ papers to publicize to the general public or scientific community. There is a feature in Manuscript Central that appears on the dashboard at the final recommendation stage. It allows you to flag an article for promotion when you make a final decision. It is here that you can add a few sentences to describe the importance of the research and why the paper should be promoted.

JEQ has a Twitter account (@jenvironqual). Follow JEQ if you’re on Twitter and please retweet messages.  Also, send your ideas and comments about articles or scientific issues in JEQ to Ann Edahl to tweet and/or post on Facebook.

Contact information for JEQ  

Ann Edahl, managing editor (aedahl@sciencesocieties.org)

Bill Cook, director of publications (bcook@sciencesocieties.org)

Abby Morrison, editorial assistant (amorrison@sciencesocieties.org)

Lauren Van Driel submissions manager (lvandriel@sciencesocieties.org)

Tricia Newell publications marketing coordinator (tnewell@sciencesocieties.org)

Acknowledgments

The success of JEQ in producing important and timely scientific articles is due to the conscientious and diligent efforts of the JEQ Technical Editors, Associate Editors, and ASA-CSSA-SSSA staff.  We thank the members of the JEQ Editorial Board and ASA-CSSA-SSSA staff for their efforts in maintaining rigorous standards for evaluating, reviewing and editing manuscripts.

Ed Gregorich, Editor

Ann Edahl, Managing Editor

Journal of Environmental Quality

ACS324.1 Journal of Environmental Quality Editorial Board Managing Editor's Report—Ann Edahl

Production

A summary of papers published, total pages, and article length for 2017 compared with previous volumes is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Summary of papers published in JEQ.

Submissions

Table 2 shows the number of submissions in 2017 (January–September) and location of corresponding author.

Table 2. Submissions report.

† Year to date (Jan.–Sept. 30).

Online Usage Statistics

Table 3 shows the online usage statistics for 2017 (January–September 30).

Table 3. Usage statistics for ASA, CSSA, SSSA journals.

Impact Factor

Table 4 shows the impact factor for JEQ from 2009 to 2016.

Table 4. Impact factor for JEQ.

New Items

As of late 2016, authors may choose between two open access licensing options:

• CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (In summary: You may share immediately with attribution.)
• CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ (In summary: You may share immediately with attribution, but not for commercial or derivative purposes.)

Some institutions and funding agencies require the CC BY license. A website and web ad in the Digital Library were created to educate readers and authors about the OA options: https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/open-access

ACSESS will launch an English language editing service in late 2017. The service will be two tiered and will serve authors that need help with formatting or English language. Each tier will carry a fee. Authors will need to opt-in to the service. The use of the service does not guarantee acceptance.

By fall 2018, ACSESS publications will require corresponding authors to have an OrcID to submit a paper. An OrcID is an identifier linked to a specific author. It remains the same when the author changes employers or research topics and can distinguish those with a common name. You can learn more or register for an OrcID here: https://orcid.org/.

Later this year, we will be introducing Dryad (a data repository) as a long-term storage option for large datasets associated with published dataset articles. This option will only be available for published articles. If there is future demand, we may evaluate Dryad for use during peer review as well.

We have worked with Google to improve the digital library’s rankings for article title searches. The Digital Library will get a new look in 2018, with some added features and better navigation.

Social Media and Promotion

See separate report for magazine promotion in 2017.

Journal content was also promoted to the general public through our science communication department as web stories. Questions regarding these stories can be directed to Laura Christianson, JEQ’s science communications editor, or Susan Fisk, Public & Science Communication Director (sfisk@sciencesocieties.org).

JEQ’s Twitter account, @JEnvironQual, now has more than 530 followers.

Sales and Marketing

In 2017, Tricia Newell, who is in charge of all sales and marketing of the Digital Library and publications, continues to attend international meetings to promote JEQ and the ACSESS Digital Library (DL). There is still a commitment in marketing Society publications to Universities, Consortia, and Corporations that specialize in Agricultural and