Data, briefly

Data has been the buzzword around the Materials Today office at Elsevier over the past few weeks, as we both prepare for some exciting data-projects with the Elsevier Materials Science Council (find out more at www.materialstoday.com/council) and launch some exciting new initiatives in the Materials Today family of journals.

With researchers both increasingly wanting and needing to share curated and formatted raw data in a citable and publically available manner, we are delighted to announce that the journal Computational Materials Science is the first journal in the Materials Today family to offer two new opportunities to help share research data in a convenient form. The first of these initiatives in Open Data: this free service (also now available in the journal CALPHAD) allows authors to upload their raw research data as supplementary information, which is published as open access content alongside their peer-reviewed research article in ScienceDirect. The second of these new prospects is a collaboration with the dedicated data journal Data in Brief: this journal, launched just last year, helps researchers share and reuse each other's datasets by publishing data articles from all scientific fields, containing descriptions of the data vital for its reuse. Now, Computational Materials Science is directly linked to Data in Brief. Together these initiatives mean that Computational Materials Science is able to provide details of the study and findings through traditional articles, the raw data, and context for the interpretation and use of the data.

If this proves successful, the same initiatives could be rolled out to other titles in the future: let us know what you think via www.materialstoday.com. And stay tuned to the website (or sign up for the newsletter through your free Materials Today member account) to find out more data initiatives we’ll be involved in throughout 2015.

But moving on from future developments to recent progress, this issue features our regular mix of news and reviews, beginning and closing with our Uncovered feature. On our latest cover you can find Claudio Ferraro and colleagues’ silicon carbide lollipop, and read about the development of lightweight, stiff and strong porous SiC structures in the article. In our Comment article, Xin Zhao and Wenguo Cui look at how a new therapy takes advantages of disease itself to treat the disease using injectable and bioresponsive hydrogels, in Disease-triggered hydrogel therapy. Moving on to reviews, we begin with Nam-Gyu Park discussing Perovskite solar cells: An emerging photovoltaic technology and their recent rise in efficiency. Next, Dan Li et al. review three promising, scalable methods of graphene production, in Scalable production of graphene via wet chemistry: Progress and challenges. Yong-Young Noh and co-workers describe innovative developments in Contact engineering in organic field-effect transistors, and the mechanisms behind them. Finally, Tapas Kumar Maji and colleagues cover several interpenetration phenomenon observed in coordination polymers, their intriguing structural aspects and fascinating material properties, in Interpenetration in coordination polymers: Structural diversities toward porous functional materials.

And so, as always, we hope you enjoy this issue of Materials Today.