In press

On Materials Today we like to think we’re at the forefront of providing information to materials researchers – and so I’m sorry to say that it's taken us so long to embrace the advantage of publishing ‘articles in press’ ahead of print publication that so many of our sister journals have been using for some time. But I’m now very happy to reveal that we’ve finally made the transition and the latest content can be found via materialstoday.com and ScienceDirect.

This means that our articles can read and cited (using the DOI) much sooner, with papers accepted for publication made available without further delay. While there is a short pause over the summer before the July–August double issue arrives in print, a steady stream of content will continue to be published online – take a look right now, and you may find my next Editorial waiting for you…

As we move toward article level publishing, we (arguably) move away from issue level publication – but I believe it's possible to retain the best aspects of both. We’ll still be continuing to compile issues for print and online, and mailing the Table of Contents. And on materialstoday.com it is of course possible to search and filter content by topic, rather than date, meaning readers are able to simply find the content they require – without the rest.

And so, I’ll introduce this issue, and leave the ‘in press’ content for another time. Opening and closing the issue, Babak Anasori, Majid Beidaghi and Yury Gogotsi cover (literally) graphene – transition metal oxide hybrid materials in our regular Uncovered feature. And in this issue's Comment article, Jiming Bao takes a look at how the rapidly growing field of photocatalytic solar water splitting has developed over the last few years.

On to this issue's research articles, Joel Miller reviews organic-based and molecule based magnetic materials that exhibit a range of unusual magnetic properties. Next Henk J. Bolink and colleagues discuss the recent progress and future prospects of light-emitting electrochemical cells, one of the simplest kinds of electroluminescent devices. One of the most important methods in materials synthesis, Stacey Bent et al. review atomic layer deposition, covering the fundamentals and various applications. Finally, Roger Narayan and co-workers describe the results of a study into piezoelectric inkjet for loading microneedles and other drug delivery devices with pharmacologic agents.

And so, until next time enjoy, this issue of Materials Today.