Welcome to issues 5–6 in 2025 of Surface Innovations. As the new Editor in chief I would like to thank Professor Jaroslaw Drelich for his work in setting up this journal and making it a success as the founding editor in chief and the original proposer of the journal. In connection with that the journal has just increased its Impact Factor to 3.5, which I am very happy about.
Impact factors are easily measurable and comparable, so are often used to compare journals with one another but they are not very good for comparing between subjects or styles of journal because there are a number of other factors affecting them that are not related to the quality of the publication. In this case, however, there has been little change in the journal style or subject so the progression of our impact factor is more meaningful. We hope that an increased impact factor will increase the number and quality of submissions, allowing us to increase the impact factor further, but this highlights a potential problem. Just as in scientific funding, universities attracting students and even business success impact factors can become a self-fulfilling prophecy protecting the historically successful from failure and blocking newcomers from succeeding, which means that moving up to this level is a great achievement but it is not enough to make our position safe, which leaves the editorial board with a difficult balancing act between quality and quantity to maintain the level and hopefully continue the increase.
Making this more difficult than ever are the forces of Scientific fraud, which has been shown to have become an increasingly organized network1 driven by both scientific ambition, because funding and position is often dependent upon prior success, and also by more direct financial interests, making it increasingly more difficult for journals to judge quality.
It is not just journals that are under pressure from bad science though, during the Covid19 outbreak I noticed a number of people using Preprint archives to underpin their pro or anti vaccine arguments and a number of those papers were never submitted to peer review or were retracted, allowing bad actors to, at least temporarily, present anything at all as a scientific paper. Retractionwatch (retractionwatch.com) have a list of over 500 Covid-19 papers that have been retracted or withdrawn. Even the next level of the publication system, for example ResearchGate, is not immune from abuse, apparently some are abusing the platform to their advantage by manipulating the metrics to publicise themselves and presumable manipulate their own h index.2
One potential counter move by journals (e.g. Nature) that we will be watching carefully is to publish peer review reports. At the moment this is not easy to do and as the journal Nature also reports getting reviewers is becoming more difficult anyway without this move with the average turnaround time (submission to acceptance) increasing to 149 days. That seems way higher than this journal but it is also a bit misleading, because it includes various subjects and publishers, but it is a significant increase from 140 in 2014.3
Although that all seems that we are in a hopeless competition it also means that primary journals like this one are still very important as more reliable sources of information because published articles have at least been reviewed and are open for potential reply or retraction after publication. It also means that the impact factor at least stands as a sign of quality, although a quick look at Retraction Watch reveals that high impact journals are particular targets for bad science. That people are publishing about the problems, however, means that countermeasures are already in place in many of those situations, making fraud risky again but meaning that a kind of arms race is taking place.
Back to normal business this issue contains five research articles on different aspects of surface innovation.
In maybe the area that many assume is core for this journal, superwetting phenomena. In this issue, we have a contribution where hydrophobic/hydrophilic surface patterning is used to influence drop behaviour. In this case, a significant aspect is the collection of condensing liquid into specific points where drops form but are not strongly attached.4
One of our wider aspects is improvements in industrial surface modification processes.
One of the papers in this issue focusses on leather colouration using entirely bioderived chemicals and emphasizes sustainability in an industry that traditionally generated very problematic waste.5
Another is on corrosion and corrosion inhibitors, using various imidazolines to protect steel. Corrosion inhibitors are old technology and imidazolines have been used for some time, but this contribution reveals more of the mechanism and optimal chain length of these inhibitors.6
One comparatively new alloy is magnesium-lithium, which has a high strength-to-weight ratio and extremely low density but it is particularly susceptible to corrosion. Here, we present a paper where arc discharge is used in an electrolyte containing graphene particles to generate a passive surface coating and optimise hardness and passivity.7
The biomedical arena, however, is full of surface innovation; in this issue we also present a paper on polymer-grafted porous silica for small interfering RNA (siRNA) encapsulation. siRNA is a biomedical tool that is similar to mRNA in that RNA must be somehow smuggled into cells but the encapsulation is different enough to be a separate research area. The surface innovation being the combination of specific inorganic and organic materials to sequester and stabilise a small molecule.8
