Stephan Matthiesen

Special Issue of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP)

A Special Issue of the scientific journal "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP)" has just been launched. By the end of next year, this issue will contain the publications from the Bortas project. Editors are (besides myself) Bryan Duncan (NASA), Paul Monks (Uni Leicester) and Rob MacKenzie (Uni Birmingham).

ACP is an open access journal, published by Copernicus Publications for the European Geophysical Union (EGU) - the articles will, of course, be freely accessible with no costs for anybody who is interested in our research. A particular feature of the EGU journals is the two-stage, transparent review and publication process: in the first stage, newly submitted articles are only checked by the editor if they are generally suitable for the scope of the journal, and then they are published immediately, before the formal review, as discussion papers in ACP Discussions.

While the paper is being reviewed by invited referees, other interested researchers can also submit comments, and the (anonymous) reviews are also published on the discussion page, together with replies by the authors and the decision of the editor. The authors then have to consider the reviews and comments when revising the paper before it is published as final paper in ACP.

This process is designed to make new results available as quickly as possible, and to make the whole decision and publication process more transparent than traditional journals.