Nothing brings people together like a crisis, and there can be no crisis like the end of the world. Last week, researchers from all over the world came together at the University of Surrey to exchange ideas at the Advanced Energy Materials 2018 conference. Following some stern stats in the plenaries of the brutal pace of catastrophic climate change, the building was awash with ideas and developments for alternative energy generation and storage technologies. “For clean energy we need more than one solution,” said John Zhu, from the University of Queensland in Australia. While his own presentation focused on solid-oxide fuel cells, he emphasized how fue- cell and battery research can complement each other. Similarly, many of the researchers attending the meeting had potential collaborations at the top of their agenda for the conference.
Of course, not all energy materials research is motivated by the harm caused by fossil fuels, and while scientific meetings and conferences continue to multiply, most of them have little or nothing to do with a pending climate-change-induced global apocalypse. However, the urge to collaborate remains a common thread, allowing researchers to pool resources and find new space for discovery that weaves together different strands of expertise.
If the number of scientific conferences seems to be growing, the number of journals housing peer-reviewed research seems to be breeding at the rate of bacteria in a petri dish, and like bacteria some of these new journals could prove vital for the health of the communities they serve. The recently launched Journal of Physics: Materials, which published its first papers this week, is aiming to be one of those journals the field can’t live without, and some of the reasons include collaboration and cross-fertilization.
“Actually the emergence of new journals is a bit impressive and overwhelming – and we see that journals are focusing more and more on a narrower scope,” said ICREA Professor and Journal of Physics: Materials Editor-in-Chief Stephan Roche in an interview with Physics World. “Journal of Physics: Materials on the contrary wants to emphasize the quality of the science but wants to keep a large landscape so that we have a platform where advances in novel materials or the foundation for technologies will knit together and inspire other authors publishing in the journal to collaborate.”
A new player hits the scene in materials science
So far the claim does not seem an empty aspiration. Discussing just a handful of the papers in the first issue revealed a ripe opportunity for collaboration between authors of two of the papers reporting results from graphene-based research, and with so many developments cropping up at the interface of different disciplines, there may be more interesting work to come from authors of less obviously associated papers teaming up.
You can find coverage of some of the energy storage research presented at Advanced Energy Materials 2018 as well as some of the highlights from the first issue of Journal of Physics: Materials including graphene plasmon device research and nanoscale polymer LED fabrication in the materials section of Physics World.
