Looking Forward to the Next Decade of Energy Research

Dear Readers, There is no doubt that many editorials these days will be focusing on the one topic that dominated the last year and how Covid influenced (and still influences) life, business, conference travel and research in general. Every one of us had to overcome hardships and experienced challenges in the context of work-life balance. Interestingly, when most of the Wiley offices switched to work-from-home mode there was barely any disruption within the company. At the Advanced journals we were able to continue focusing on what matters most to us: Providing the best possible service to our authors, reviewers and readers. Unfortunately, we had to postpone the physical events we had planned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Advanced Energy Materials and also the anniversary special issues will be delayed. But we hope you agree that despite the rough times in 2020, we can now look back on some impressive results. First and foremost, at Advanced Energy Materials, we were very proud to host an online event in honor of Chemistry Nobel Laureate Prof. John B. Goodenough together with our colleagues from Advanced Functional Materials. We very much appreciated his kind words during the event which took place on his 98th birthday. The presenters and also many more experts from the global electrochemical energy storage community also contributed to the accompanying special issue across both journals which reflects the high standard of battery research across the globe. Special thanks for all their support go to guest editors Prof. Arumugam Manthiram and Prof. Yunhui Huang. We also featured special issues on two other main topics of our journal besides electrochemical energy storage, namely catalysis and solar cells, also with a special emphasis on characterization methods. Particularly the latter special issue is a response to the call for more unified and standardized reporting of key materials properties and performance metrics. As a next step in this direction, we are pleased to present the Emerging PV Efficiency Reports: a new initiative from our journal in collaboration with an internationally diverse scientific advisory panel focused on collecting and analyzing the best achievements in emerging photovoltaic materials research, e.g., organic, perovskite, and dye-sensitized solar cells. The summary of this survey, based on peer-reviewed research articles, will be regularly published in Advanced Energy Materials and on our online platform Authorea. This initiative is a major step to continuously improve reproducibility and data quality, and provides a reference for good practices and state-of-the-art reports. Towards the end of last year, we simplified the submission and transfer process for authors. All Advanced and Small journals and most of their sister journals now have a single concise set of article types. The most notable change is the discontinuation of the article types “Communication” and “Full Paper”, which are replaced by “Research Article” and can contain original research studies of any length. More information on the article types can be found here, specifically under “Article Types”. We believe this is a significant step towards making life easier for our authors, readers and reviewers as it greatly reduces the need for formatting in general and reformatting after transfer to a sister journal. It also brings us one step closer to free-format submissions. This initiative is part of a global project across Wiley and you will see similar changes to Wiley's complete portfolio of journals. It underlines the efforts Wiley is undertaking to make life easier for researchers when preparing, submitting and reading manuscripts. We at Advanced Energy Materials wish all of you a successful start to 2021 and look forward to your submissions. Best regards, Till von Graberg