Advanced Optical Materials is Making its Way Up

It has been an eventful year for the optics research community and the optical industry sector, not least because 2015 was the UNESCO International Year of Light. Light technologies are the basis of a multi-billion dollar industry as well as an integral part of our everyday lives. Optical research is a motor for innovation and its application areas are numerous. This variety is reflected by the broad spectrum of high quality work published in Advanced Optical Materials. Let's have a look back on some of the high points of 2015. One highlight was definitely the special issue on “Optical Materials for Spectral Management” guest-edited by Ralf Wehrspohn and Stefan Schweizer. This compilation included review articles on different spectral converters as fluoride hosts and methods to tune the fluorescence of phosphors and their applications in photovoltaics, scintillator materials, and solid-state lighting. Furthermore, many new results on materials for up- and down-conversion were published, three examples being novel energy-transfer materials presented by Andries Meijerink et al., an innovative topotactic transformation synthetic route from Hongpeng You and colleagues, and persistent and photostimulated red emission in nanophosphors presented by John Capobianco. The whole issue can be found here. We were also very proud to be able to present a very special article series dedicated to celebrate the International Year of Light. The topics of the featured review articles, written by experts in their fields, span carbon nanotube photodetectors and photonic structures for light harvesting to micro-transfer printing and plasmonic nanoparticles. You can find all of the contributions in the table below or online at www.advopticalmat.de/IYL. In the past two years the Best of Advanced Optical Materials editions were very well received by the community. Therefore, this year we also selected some of the most outstanding articles from all original articles published in the twelve issues of 2015. The collection can be found at www.best-of-advanced-optical-materials-2015.com and gives you a good impression of the high quality and broad scope of the content published in Advanced Optical Materials. The excellent research published in Advanced Optical Materials has contributed to the journal's first one-year impact factor of 4.062, which is a very promising result underlining the position among the top optics journals. Citations and impact factors are not the only measures of a journal's performance and the quality of the presented research; but this inaugural value, together with our 2015 Immediacy Index of 1.132, provides a solid foundation on which to build in future years. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our Editorial Advisory Board members for their help and advice over the last year, all authors who submitted to the journal, and last but certainly not least all of the more than 1200 reviewers who help to maintain the standards of the journal. We would especially like to mention our most frequent reviewers—Hongbing Fu, Jianfang Wang, Dai-Sik Kim, Hirohiko Fukagawa, Paul Braun, Yong Sheng Zhao, Timothy Bunning, and He Tian—for their generous contributions to the success of the journal. Thank you very much! For the coming year of 2016 we wish you great success and hope that we can contribute to it through our continuous publishing efforts and dedication to good customer service. P.S.: For any kind of feedback please contact us at advopticalmat@wiley-vch.de.