A New Phase in Interface Science–Advanced Materials Interfaces goes Bio

We are entering another exciting year of publishing top-level research on interfaces and surfaces that play an essential role in virtually all materials and devices. Traditionally, we use this opportunity to review the past year and to take a look at the upcoming twelve months. After 30 years as Editor-in-Chief of Advanced Materials and the Editor-in-Chief of Advanced Materials Interfaces Peter Gregory will be passing on this honor and responsibility to a new generation and has retired from Wiley (see Figure 1 for announcement). In 2019, Advanced Materials Interfaces celebrated its 5th volume with a special birthday issue published in February 2019, which is the same month in which it published its very first issue. Figure 2 shows the front cover of this issue, designed by Qiang Zhang and co-workers from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. (The image of the mermaids at the complex coast between sea and land stands for the working interfaces between liquid and solid phases in sulfur redox reactions.) Additional articles and posts related to our celebration included interviews with Prof. Yuekun Lai, Prof. Maria Antonietta Loi, and Prof. Hong Zhao on our news platform Advanced Science News and quotes by Pzrof. Sander Leeuwenburg, one of our new Editorial Board members, as well as Prof. Tong Lin and Prof. Shlomo Magdassi on Twitter. In the past year, Advanced Materials Interfaces has been able to maintain its position as an important journal in in the area of interfaced-based research with an Impact Factor of 4.713 (2018 Clarivate Journal Citation Reports). Table 1 shows a list of papers from 2016/2017 that contributed most to the success of the first full impact factor. Some articles have drawn additional attention via news and social media platforms, which is reflected by their high Altmetric scores. A selection of articles that had an exceptionally broad impact in the media in 2019 is shown in Table 2. In this regard, it is particularly worth mentioning our ongoing Hall of Fame series (HoF) of invited-only review articles from top scientists in their fields, which launched in 2018. The HoF articles are collected into a special virtual issue and remain among the top-cited articles in 2019. This year, we certainly look forward to new cutting-edge contributions within this article series. Another highlight in 2019 was the Special Issue on “Functional Thin-Film Oxides” guest-edited by Nini Pryds (Technical University of Denmark) and Albert Tarancón (IREC, Barcelona, Spain). A number of Special Issues are planned for 2020, including: “Bottom-up assembly of Micro/Nanostructures” with Massimo Mastrangeli (Technical University Delft, NL) and Michele Perego (CNR, Rome, Italy), “Wetting-Empowered Surface Functions for Engineering Applications”, guest-edited by Hans-Jürgen Butt, Ben Bin Xu, and Yifan Li, and “Hierarchically-ordered Materials” by Wilhelm Schwieger, Martin Hartmann, and Matthias Thommes. As the submission of content devoted to our Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) section sharply declined during the last year, as of the start of 2020, we will no longer pursue the publication of this section. Nonetheless, various deposition techniques and their application remain an important part of our content, and we strongly encourage our authors to continue submitting their work focusing on methods such as chemical vapor deposition, atomic layer deposition, and related techniques as regular submissions to the journal. Special thanks go to our Editorial Board Members Michael Hitchman (University of Strathclyde, UK), Graziella Malandrino (Università Degli Studi di Catania, Italy), Francis Maury (CNRS; Toulouse), Anjana Devi (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany), Martyn Pemble (University College Cork, Ireland), Mikko Ritala (University of Helsinki, Finland), Yukihiro Shimogaki (University of Tokyo, Japan), and Aleksander Wrobel (Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Poland) for their collaboration and input for this section over the last four years. As is so often the case, the end of an era is the beginning of something new and, therefore, Advanced Materials Interfaces has launched a new article series on Biomaterials with this first 2020 issue. Given the importance and topicality of Biomaterials/Biointerfaces, we are aiming to publish articles related to all topics of biomaterials, such as hydrogels, tissue engineering, drug delivery, etc. in each issue this year. Authors are encouraged to submit relevant work either as an original research paper or as review-type content. Moreover, we will invite contributions from selected experts in this field. Open Access publication is becoming ever more important. A landmark agreement was signed in January 2019 between Wiley and Projekt DEAL which provides Open Access publication in and full read access to most of Wiley's journals to a vast majority of German academic institutions. Advanced Materials Interfaces, together with Wiley's other materials science and physics journals, is covered by this agreement. It allows submitting corresponding authors affiliated with eligible institutions to publish their articles in our journal under an Open Access license, with costs being covered by their institutions under this agreement. Learn more about the agreement with Projekt DEAL here. We are very grateful for the continuous support of our peer reviewers, who invest an incredible amount of time and expertise to ensure the quality and integrity of articles that we publish is high. In order to give our reviewers public credit for their contribution we are now offering to deposit reviewer activities to ORCID. If you are interested in participating in this reviewer recognition service, simply opt-in the next time you review for us and log in to ORCID to confirm your authorization. Once activated and if “Yes” is selected as the default answer, all your future review activities for the journal will be automatically associated with your ORCID ID. ORCID profiles will be updated once every three months. Your identity as a reviewer will be protected; only the journal name and year will be mentioned, whereas no manuscript or author details would be shown in your ORCID profile and your information will not be shared with the author. At this point we would like to thank our Advisory Board members, authors, reviewers and readers for your continuous interest as well as support of Advanced Materials Interfaces. We hope to serve up more great publications in the upcoming year! Wishing you a successful and happy 2020! On behalf of the editorial team,