Two Years of PhysChem: Current Status and Future Developments

Two years ago, PhysChem was launched as a new physical chemistry journal publishing original research articles, reviews and perspectives, and communications focusing on physics-based description of chemical phenomena and their applications. This is a relatively broad scope ranging from machine learning to renewable energy technologies, but with a core thread of key phenomena requiring a physical–chemical approach.

PhysChem is still in its infancy, welcoming several dozen papers per year. The journal is seeing an increased number of submissions (with a growth on the order of 20%) but also a lower rate of acceptance (about 40%). We are committed to ensuring that all papers published in the journal undergo a high-quality blind peer review by independent reviewers. We are also striving to increase the value of submitting to PhysChem. In 2024, we plan to introduce a trial program whereby the authors will be able to request editorial feedback on papers that were rejected or recommended for major revisions, with the aim of bringing the work up to publishable standard.

Moving into 2024, we plan to make several changes to the journal. We would like to welcome articles introducing new ideas or offering new approaches, including new approaches to otherwise known yet outstanding research problems. We will also introduce Topic Collections, which will focus on high-impact topics. Different from Special Issues, these are ‘live’ collections aiming to gather new articles on a topic. Perspective authors will soon be able to contribute to a new collection “Batteries Beyond Mainstream”, and we plan to announce other topical collections in the course of the year. We are introducing a new section “Electrochemistry” with a dedicated Section Editor-in-Chief to account for the importance of this field, which is a nexus for the development of multiple technologies, including sustainable energy generation and storage technologies.

In cooperation with other MDPI journals, PhysChem has begun to participate in MDPI Topics, cross-journal topical collections where articles focusing on a given research topic can be published in any of the participating journals. This year, we contributed to the Topic “Fabrication of Hybrid Materials for Catalysis” in cooperation with Catalysts, Hydrogen, Molecules, and Nanomaterials. We have plans for a number of new MDPI Topics, including those focused on physical chemistry and chemical physics. Readers can find all the papers published by the participating journals on the Topics webpage. In this way we strive to adapt to scope overlaps and dispersion of work addressing similar research issues across multiple journals, which is a necessary consequence of the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of many works.

The journal will continue to evolve to better serve the needs of the authors and of the scientific community in a highly competitive ecosystem. We are excited to continue developing the journal in 2024.