Title: <i>Advanced Optical Materials</i> in the New Decade: From Metamaterials, Smart Soft Matter, and Lasers to Terahertz, Polaritons, and AIE
Abstract: Welcome to this first issue of Advanced Optical Materials in 2020! The dawn of the new decade brings with it important changes for the journal and the entire Advanced family. After 30 years as Editor-in-Chief of Advanced Materials and later Advanced Optical Materials and Advanced Materials Interfaces Peter Gregory will be passing on this honor and responsibility to a new generation and has retired from Wiley (see Figure 1 for announcement). Advanced Optical Materials is currently looking for a successor as Editor-in-Chief which we will announce to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, Jose Oliveira, who many of you already will know well as the Editor-in-Chief of our micro- and nanotechnology sister journal Small, will serve as the acting Editor-in-Chief of Advanced Materials, Advanced Optical Materials, and Advanced Materials Interfaces. While remembering Peter as our phenomenal frontman, we proudly realize that Advanced Optical Materials is no longer a newcomer in the field of photonic materials, systems, and technologies, and has developed into a strong forum of choice for the international scientific community. Since its launch as an independent journal in 2013, the popularity of the journal is constantly growing, as is the number of submissions from researchers from all over the world. Reflecting its ongoing success, Advanced Optical Materials received an Impact Factor of 7.125 in 2019. The authors that with their most cited articles have contributed most to this value are ranked in Table 1, and we congratulate them on this fine achievement. In addition, an honorable mention should go to Jeremy J. Baumberg and co-workers (University of Cambridge, UK), whose recent paper “Motile Artificial Chromatophores: Light-Triggered Nanoparticles for Microdroplet Locomotion and Color Change” was highlighted in many news media and reached an Altmetric Attention Score of no less than 193. Adv. Optical Mater. 2016, 4, 818–833 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201500690 Adv. Optical Mater. 2016, 4, 1829–1837 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201600327 Adv. Optical Mater. 2016, 4, 1223–1229 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201600214 Adv. Optical Mater. 2016, 4, 897–905 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201500666 Adv. Optical Mater. 2016, 4, 1824–1828 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201600303 Adv. Optical Mater. 2017, 5, 1700416 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201700416 Adv. Optical Mater. 2017, 5, 1600704 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201600704 Adv. Optical Mater. 2016, 4, 1780–1786 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201600250 Adv. Optical Mater. 2017, 5, 1700116 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201700116 In reaction to the growth of the journal, our editorial capacity has also increased, and submissions are now handled by a truly global team of passionate editors, working from offices in Germany (Weinheim and Berlin), China (Beijing and Shanghai), and the United States (Hoboken). Jipei Yuan has recently been promoted and has joined Anja Wecker and Jos Lenders as Deputy Editor of Advanced Optical Materials at the Wiley office in Beijing. We are also glad to be supported by an international Editorial Advisory Board of leading experts, representing the various topics that are covered by Advanced Optical Materials. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their continued advice. To give you an insight into the research published in Advanced Optical Materials, we assembled the so far most read papers that appeared in the journal last year in Table 2. Among them there are some insightful Reviews and Progress Reports. Those invited contributions are both useful as an introduction for scientists entering the field and as a point of reference for established researchers. Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801673 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801673 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801154 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801154 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801602 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801602 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1900239 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201900239 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801282 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801282 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1900267 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201900267 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801643 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801643 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801417 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801417 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1900598 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201900598 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801683 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801683 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801813 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801813 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1800778 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201800778 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1900019 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201900019 Adv. Optical Mater. 2019, 7, 1801433 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801433 Attention should also be paid to the special issues published in Advanced Optical Materials in 2019, namely “Metamaterials and Metasurfaces” with Xiangang Luo (Institute of Optics and Electronics, CAS, Chengdu, China), “Light-Responsive Smart Soft Matter Technologies” with Quan Li (Kent State University, US), Albert Schenning (Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands), and Timothy Bunning (Air Force Research Laboratory, US), and “Micro- and Nanolasers” with Yong Sheng Zhao (Institute of Chemistry, CAS, Beijing, China) as guest editors, respectively. The front covers of these inspiring special issues are shown in Figure 2. Stay tuned for the upcoming special issues in 2020 on “Terahertz Technologies” guest-edited by Ranjan Singh (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), on “Polaritons in Nanomaterials” guest-edited by Qing Dai (National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, China), and on “20 Years of Aggregation-Induced Emission (AIE) Research” guest-edited by Bin Liu (National University of Singapore), Ben Zhong Tang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China), and Ryan Tsz Kin Kwok (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China). Noticing the great interest in topical issues, a set of research topics that are rapidly developing and interesting for the broad readership of Advanced Optical Materials has been selected to be presented in virtual issues, namely “Metasurfaces”, “2D Materials with Optical Properties”, “Applied Plasmonics”, “Organic Light-Emitting Diodes”, “Photodetectors”, and “Perovskites in Optoelectronics”, as well as (still upcoming at this time) “Bioimaging and Biosensing”, “Natural and Bioinspired Optics”, and “Supramolecular Nanophotonics”. Each of these virtual issues contains an editors' selection of original research as well as review papers published in Advanced Optical Materials and can be read for free for a limited time. If you are interested in the editors' choice of the best papers published in 2018, the Best of Advanced Optical Materials 2018 collection is your place to go. The 2019 edition will be released soon – keep an eye out on http://www.advopticalmat.com. Open Access publication is becoming ever more important. A landmark agreement was signed in January 2019 between Wiley and Projekt DEAL which provides Open Access publication in and read access to most of Wiley's journals to a vast majority of German academic institutions. Advanced Optical Materials, together with the other Advanced journals, is covered by this agreement. It allows corresponding authors based at these German institutions to publish their articles in our journal under an Open Access license, while costs are covered by their institutions under this agreement. Learn more about the agreement with Projekt DEAL here and find out if your institution is a participant in this or other national Open Access programs at Wiley here. Looking at the Advanced family of journals, we are glad that the number of sister journals is constantly growing. Expanding opportunities for Open Access publication in the Advanced family of journals, the latest addition is the Open Access journal Advanced Intelligent Systems, which had its first regular issue in May 2019. Covering high-quality scientific and engineering research on artificial systems that recognize, process, and respond to stimuli or instructions and learn from experience, Advanced Intelligent Systems might also be an exciting home for your next paper. For more information and an impression of the research that has already been published, please visit http://www.advintellsyst.com. There are even more Advanced Open Access journal launches to come soon and we are sure that they will be as successful as Advanced Optical Materials. Finally, we do not want to miss the chance to thank you all for your contributions to Advanced Optical Materials, as readers, authors or reviewers. The latter are especially important to keep up the high standards that we expect from research published with us. We appreciate that so far roughly 3700 expert reviewers from all over the world, despite their busy schedules, were willing to support us by investing their precious time. In particular, we would like to thank our top referees in 2019 (listed in alphabetical order) for devoting their energy to many insightful reviewer reports for Advanced Optical Materials: Arash Ahmadivand, Tie Jun Cui, Xiaosheng Fang, Malte C. Gather, Jr-Hau He, Weida Hu, Shin-Hyun Kim, Alexander E. Krasnok, Alexander Kühne, Tae-Woo Lee, Quan Li, Xiangang Luo, Andrey E. Miroshnichenko, Joon Hak Oh, Alex Paarmann, Cheng-Wei Qiu, Junsuk Rho, Hisahiro Sasabe, Ranjan Singh, Qinghai Song, Handong Sun, Youhei Takeda, Jian-Xin Tang, Jianfang Wang, Qiangbin Wang, Bodo Wilts, Zhiguo Xia, Hui Xu, Xiaodong Yang, and Yating Zhang. In this context, we are also happy to let you know that from 2020 onwards you will have the option to claim credit for your reviewer activities on your ORCID profile to be recognized as a reviewer for Advanced Optical Materials and the other Advanced journals. You will need to have and provide us with your ORCID iD for this. If you are interested, please answer “Yes” to the related question in the review form upon submission of your reviewer report to the editorial office and log in to ORCID to confirm your authorization. Your identity as a reviewer will be protected; no manuscript or author details would be shown in your ORCID profile and your information will not be shared with the author. We are looking forward to cooperating with all of you also in this new decade and hope to see your best work published in Advanced Optical Materials soon. The editorial team of Advanced Optical Materials