新材旧料多，量子今儿个
卜算子 •《量子材料》
格物自然吟，曲在吟因果
谁赋时空万象新，量子今儿个
新也百年歌，几处辞烟火
已到新材旧料多，正好登台我
0. 编按
在完成了对一年一度的诺贝尔奖三大自然科学奖的欢呼、呐喊之后，我们也许愿意坐下来，平复一下情绪，例如去读一读那些“平常和 smooth”的“茶余饭后”。这是其中的一篇。
《量子材料》公众号很少刊发期刊自身的推广宣传文章。这篇英文文章并非例外，只是目前供职于 Springer – Nature 出版集团的高级编辑刘波博士为期刊《npj Quantum Materials》撰写的一篇内部论坛交流文章 (Journals spotlight)。文章着重体现了出版集团与刊物运作的文化特征与追求更高、更高、更强的脚步。因此，读者可以将此文当成推广文章而忽略，也可以将此文当成现代科学研究领域内“发表”文化的某些总结提炼。编者与笔者闲聊后，觉得稍作改动后亦适合在《量子材料》公众号登出。
1. What is Journal spotlight
This post is part of a new series of Spotlight blogs that provide an introduction to notable titles that we are proud of for the Springer Nature Journals group and Springer Nature as a whole.
npj Quantum Materials (https://www.nature.com/npjquantmats/journal-information) has just celebrated its 5th anniversary (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41535-021-00366-x). And despite being a young journal in a young open - access (OA) journal series (NPJ, https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/about/npj-series), it published almost 100 articles last year. “Quantum Materials” sounds both fancy and intricate – it represents several vivid subfields in condensed matter physics. But even for scientists, it is hard to tell exactly where “Quantum” meets “Materials”. This is Bo, the Managing Editor for npj Quantum Materials, and it is my great honor and pleasure to tell you the stories behind the journal.
2. Vision: a title that inspires
An engaging title is vital to the success of a journal. The birth of npj Quantum Materials was not effortless. The partner Nanjing University (NJU) proposed several titles based on their most distinguished and strong research directions, such as Advanced Microstructures, Quantum Condensed Matters, Quantum Materials, and Quantum Matters. On the other hand, the npj management team at that time favored “Correlated Electron Systems”. The NJU delegates, who are physicists, thought this title sounded too specialized. After many impassioned discussions and careful evaluation by the Review Committee, the present title of npj Quantum Materials was approved.
The term “Quantum Materials” has only become popular among physicists since 2012, evolving from an older term “strongly correlated electronic systems”, a subfield of condensed matter physics (please see our 5th anniversary Editorial for more details, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41535-021-00366-x). There were no other journals and few research centers called “Quantum Materials” or anything similar at that time (2015), so it was indeed a bold yet rewarding move to go with “Quantum Materials”. Entering the new millennium, the community witnessed the discovery of many new classes of “Quantum Materials”, including topological insulators (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08916) (which exhibit anomalous quantum Hall effect), graphene, magic-angle graphene superlattices (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature26160) and other Van der Waals hetero-structures (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12385), and the journal npj Quantum Materials has been well-poised to publish articles in all these topics, thanks to the vision of both NJU and the company.
Gimli: The Fellowship has failed.
Aragorn: Not when we hold true to each other.
--- The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring
3. Faith: the fellowship of the journal
And just as the title is important, so too is the first Editor-in-Chief (EiC). And the initial search was exhaustive. The plan was that a delegate from NJU (Prof. Jun-Ming Liu) would take charge of the daily journal operation. And through his contacts, we were able to recruit Sang-Wook Cheong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sang-Wook_Cheong) from Rutgers University, a top scientist on multiferroics and colossal magnetoelectric effects in complex oxides. However, there was still an obvious large gap in the expertise of Jun-Ming and Sang-Wook: superconductivity, a main stream research direction of Quantum Materials at that time. This was later filled by Steven Kivelson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Kivelson), a well-known American theoretical physicist from Stanford University, who made several major contributions to condensed matter physics. We are lucky that Steven agreed to join us as the EiC, thanks to Prof. Hai-hu Wen, one of the core members for the nomination and communications and then one of the Editors for the journal. To divide the workload, Jun-Ming takes care of the daily activity of the journal as the Deputy Editor and both EiCs, Sang-Wook and Steven have been highly active to speak for the journal and heavily involved in the journal development.
Both SN and NJU support this ‘unusual’ multiple EiC model, and I feel it has actually set a very good example for the partner journals.
4. Courage: starting a new OA physics journal
Physicists are well-known to be loyal to society publishers such as American Physical Society (APS, publisher of the top physics journal, Physical Review Letters) and Institute of Physics (IOP). Winning over the best manuscripts and best authors would be a long hard fight. On the other hand, physicists are used to the idea of archiving and distributing (unpublished) manuscripts for free because they had used arXiv.org for decades.
I think that the journal must have done many things right to make it work, but I’d like to emphasize one factor in particular: the quality of the peer review (as previously addressed in the inaugural Editorial, https://www.nature.com/articles/npjquantmats20166). The EiCs knew from the beginning that there was no shortcut to winning the heart of the physicists because APS has already set a high standard. The endorsement of Nature Publishing Group (at that time) and top scientists weren’t enough, and they had to do what they say - developing a prestigious condensed matter physics journal from ground by doing days and nights of hard work. The editorial team selected the best quality manuscripts and invited the best reviewers to evaluate the manuscripts, being both rigorous and polite. I can say npj Quantum Materials is one of the very few journals (that I know of) which provides editorial justifications when rejecting manuscripts (for both no-review and post peer review manuscripts).
After years of passionate and diligent service, I think the journal has won the respect of both the authors and reviewers.
Since the deputy editor Jun-Ming, the partner (NJU, also JM’s affiliation) and even myself are based in China, it is probably worth mentioning the situation in China. It takes extra effort to ask or convince Chinese authors to submit to and write for npj Quantum Materials, because Chinese researchers are often more conservative, and are disincentivized to publish in journals without an IF or OA journals, not to mention OA journals without an IF.
Despite these difficulties, Jun-Ming did a large amount of extra work to promote the journal content in China via his pop-science style articles, and sometimes poems (both in Chinese), winning a lot of attention and praises in the communities and in the general public.
Left: a snapshot of the WeChat account called “Quantum Materials” showing the articles on the main page. Credit: Jun-Ming Liu’s team.
Right: A Chinese poem written by Jun-Ming when npj Quantum Materials made its debut. The poem mainly describes how difficult it is to understand the nature (which insinuates quantum physics), yet how fascinating it is for the investigators to explore.
5. Rise: establishing its strong position
A milestone for npj Quantum Materials was obtaining its first Impact Factor (IF) of 6.5 in 2020. We surely understand that the IF is not a measure of journal impact, but for a young and growing journal, it was an excellent starting point.
But the IF alone was not enough for the new journal to get noticed: journal ranking also plays a major role. Thus the subject category (http://help.incites.clarivate.com/incitesLiveJCR/glossaryAZgroup/g12/7744-TRS.html) is also important for the journals because journals are ranked with other journals in the same subject category in the Journal Citation Report (JCR, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_Citation_Reports), which publishes the IF for all SCI-indexed journals annually. The main subject category of npj Quantum Materials was originally incorrectly assigned to “Materials Science” by Clarivate, instead of “Physics”, probably due to the word “Materials” in the title. The editorial team thought this would make the journal in a disadvantage position when compared to “Materials Science” journals, which generally have higher IFs than “Physics” journals, so we decided to appeal to Clarivate.
With the help of Sonal Shukla and the Indexing team, we showed strong evidence that npj Quantum Materials should belong to the Physics category: the first two journals citing npj Quantum Materials most often are Physical Review B and Physical Review Letters, which are typical physics journals. Fortunately, Clarivate agreed to make this change, giving the journal much higher visibility to the Physics community.
6. New era: as a forum for international collaboration
Springer Nature is an international publisher dedicated to serve international science communities as a whole and promotes diversity, equality and inclusion. So does our journal!
Despite the background of US-China relations being at their lowest point in decades, both the partner NJU and the EiCs have showed strong determination to support international academic discussions and activities.
In late 2019, NJU held a successful conference, the 1st Nanjing Conference on Quantum Materials (NCQM 2019) with npj Quantum Materials, attracting 200 top scientists (including the EiCs and several Associate Editors) mainly from Europe, US, Japan, Korea, and China to attend. A conference series has been planned, COVID permitting. As the world re-opens, npj Quantum Materials is ready to continue serving as a forum and symbol of international scientific cooperation, as advocated by the EiC, Steven Kivelson (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41535-021-00322-9).
A photo of the attendees at the 1st Nanjing Conference on Quantum Materials (NCQM 2019)
Notes (备注):
(1) 笔者刘波博士，目前供职于施普林格自然出版集团上海办公室，任自然合作期刊高级编辑。
(2) Prof Jun-Ming Liu also contributed to the article.
(3) Acknowledgement: David Gevaux, John Plummer, Wanda Layman, Nicolas Fanget, Viki Hurst, Arianne Heinrichs, Meredith LeMasurier, Joe Bennett, Quinn Colter, Rhianna Weston, Sonal Shukla, Molly Jiang, Judy Bai, Sabrina Ma, to name but a few.
(4) 文首处的小词表达了对期刊《npj Quantum Materials》的调侃与期待。编按乃Ising所加。
(5) 封面插图展示了“量子材料”的特征：量子基本自由度及其关联。图片来自 https://research.kent.ac.uk/fmg/wp-content/uploads/sites/121/2018/02/fig3-3.png。
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