Birth of a Journal: A Chronicle Reflections on Journal of Materials Research at Its Three-Year Anniversary
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ceived and launched in less than two years from initial conception and is now in its third year of publication. The Journal's immediate success is a result of its unique purpose and of the meticulous attention given it by a few dozen committed seientists. With little or no Publishing management experience, they were guided by their need for scientific information as they developed a Journal that would fill a void in the literature on advanced materials. The following is a description of the Journal's evolution from ineeption to the valuable scientific medium it is today. In the Beginning Journal of Materials Research will soon
begin its fourth volume, a very satisfying milestone for those of us who helped launch it. The Journal was designed to fill a unique role for researchers and the libraries which serve them. It's worth recounting how the myriad of qualitative and quantitative aspects of the Journal's creation quickly feil into place, for it's a story of dedicated volunteers, lofty goals, and an Organization which itself, at the time, was almost too young to tackle so formidable a task. The Materials Research Society (MRS) was founded in 1973 expressly to provide a forum for reporting scientific research on new materials in an interdisciplinary format, encompassing physical, chemical and engineering developments that all affect the advancement of materials. The opportunities to do this under the auspices of the existing societies at that time were few or nonexistent. By 1979, when this author first
MRS BULLETIN/SEPTEMBER 1988
attended an MRS meeting, the Society had not yet evolved to more than a meeting and a mailing list. At a gathering of the Society's governing Council early in 1980, one of the founders declared that MRS would not be entirely fulfilling its purpose until it published a Journal addressing materials research from its unique perspective. That Statement planted the seed which was to launch Journal of Materials (JMR) in late 1985.
In the interim, MRS took off. It had apparently Struck precisely the right theme at precisely the right time for researchers in a field (materials research and development) which was exploding into the 1980s with new fundamental discoveries and technological innovations. In short Order MRS went from organizing one scientific meeting per year, with 300 partieipants in 1979, to two meetings per year with 3,000 attendees, a widely known proeeedings series topping 60 volumes, a new short course program, a regulär newsletter approaching magazine Status, an equipment exhibit, a membership roll exceeding 4,000, and a professional headquarters staff and annual budget doubling in size annually. The Society became an internationally recognized source of information on developments in the füll spectrum of modern materials — ceramics, electronic materials, metals, polymers, cement, nuclear waste, composites, glasses, biomedical materials, etc. During this same period, technical libraries were encountering an ever increasing and bewildering array of specialized publications in
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