NPG Asia Materials celebrates a year of publishing original research

January 2013 marks the first anniversary of the publication of original research in NPG Asia Materials . During this first year, we published 24 original articles and five invited reviews. The size of the journal may look small, but it is a result of our stringent criteria and rigorous reviewing process. The journal received several times this number of submissions, and the high rejection rate reflects our ambitions for the journal: to be one of the premier materials sciences journals—Asia’s global materials science journal. Here maybe a good opportunity to restate what we are looking for in the submitted papers. We place emphasis on fundamental scientific novelty of the research, either in the sense of novel materials, or in the sense of novel physical or chemical phenomena that result in new properties and lead to advanced functionality and applications of previously known materials. The keyword is novelty—over the past year we rejected many papers that were scientifically sound and of high merit but lacked the crucial element of scientific progress.