Editorial - Materials Research - Ibero-american Journal of Materials: judicious, fair and educative!

Abstract

Thirteen years have passed since the first number of Mat. Res. was launched! The effort and strategy used to start from scratch to finally reach the present level has been an invaluable, rewarding experience to me and the associate editors. Mat. Res. is now indexed in the main international electronic databases, has a solid financial situation and has thousands of readers and authors from more than 20 countries. Overall, a total of about 900 articles have been already published (and many others rejected) involving approximately 2000 reviewers and 5000 authors. And from the number of downloads of Mat. Res. articles at (www.scielo.br/mr), one can infer that we have reached several thousand readers! These numbers are highly significant. Thank you for your interest and support, authors, readers and reviewers. It is now time for changes at Materials Research's editorial team and policies. Due to his reputation and substantial academic achievements, the three associate editors and I unanimously indicated Prof. Walter Botta-member of our editorial board and professor of the Materials Engineering Department of the Federal University of São Carlos-as the new editor-in-chief. Prof. Botta holds a D.Phil. degree in metallurgy and science of materials from Oxford University, UK, and is internationally known for his articles and conference talks on amorphous, metastable and nanostructured metallic alloys. The first suggestions I dare to give him are: i) To renovate the editorial board; ii) To raise the threshold level for accepted articles; iii) To implement strategies to reduce the review time. In this way Mat. Res. will be even more attractive to authors and, as a bonus, its impact factor is likely to increase. At present the time for publication of articles at Mat. Res. varies from 2 to 12 months (generally after 2-3 rounds) and the time for rejection varies from 1 to 6 months. iv) To focus and strengthen Materials Research's motto: "judicious and educative".