Paper out

Well, finally... My first paper was published on-line. In case anybody is reading this and is interested, the paper can be founded here http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn303423x The other papers are as they say "in the pipeline" and hopefully, I will be able to say something on the subject soon. Cheers and Happy New Year

Finally!

Well, one of our papers was finally accepted to ACS Nano. Updates forthcoming :-)

Good news and more updates

Hey, it couldn't have been only a month since my last post :-) Anyway, I've had some good news recently. Despite my scepticism, Nature Materials actually agree to send our rewritten paper for review after rejecting the initial version. suffice it to say that my boss is pretty excited (maybe overly so). Nature Materials is a sub-division (if it can be called this way) of the general journal Nature. They reject about 95% of the papers they recieve at the first stage, when editors read them (which is surprisingly or not, not that different from fiction editors and agents). The rest go to peer review (I am not sure how much of those make it into print, so, I can't speculate about our chances). The paper in its new form is pretty solid in my view. I think it is better this way than the short "brevia" version we originally submitted to Science. So, anyway, I am hoping for the best, but even if it is not published in Nature Materials, it has an excellent chance of being published in another high level journal. Which brings me to another set of good news. The paper we submitted to ACS Nano had returned from review. One reviewer suggested publishing it as is, another suggeted mostly stylistic comments and one was pretty negative. some of his comments have merit and we are working on addressing them. Some of the other comments, I have to say, are slightly weird. In any case, the revision should be finished shortly and I am pretty sure it will go through this time. ACS Nano is not as high end as Nature Materials, but it is still a very high ranking journal. So, this is very good. Our third paper is almost done (finally....) and should be out to a journal in the next few days. All in all, pretty good progress. I also have some updates on the personal front, but I'll leave them for another post.

Updates

Well, as expected our submission to Science was rejected (not really surprising, given that it is Science and given the format that we tried to publish. Since then we've reworked the paper a bit (I went through something like thirty versions of figures in addition to the previous ones) and it is now out to another journal. Overall the paper is solid and I expect it to be published. In addition, our paper with collaboration from Northwestern University was rejected from Nature Communications (you can't say that my boss doesn't have ambition :-) ), and resubmitted to ACS Nano. Chances are it will be accepted this time. The biggest issue with the paper (in my view) is it's length (about forty pages of text with several more of references). This is due to the fact that it combines work from three groups. All in all, the paper is nice and shows some interesting and cool results. The third paper (again, in collaboration with Northwestern) is finally out (in an updated form) to our collaborators. My boss is extremely proud of the way it is written despite the fact that he originally almost discarded it to low level journals, and now wants to push it to higher impact. Frankly, in the earlier version, despite some pretty solid writing, I thought the paper was weak (it still had enough to be published, but not on the high level). Now, after I've added some new results, there is "meat" to the paper, and I think we will have no trouble in publishing it. So, all in all, things are moving, albeit slowly, on this front. Not so much on other issues, but this is a topic for another time :-).

Yes, I am still alive

This turns out to be a regular feature, isn't it. I start each new post with an apology for being quiet for so long and the promise to do better in the future. So, let's just skip this part this time... The semester is finally open. I was fairly busy during the semester and the couple of weeks after it ended. Now, finally, things had calmed down a bit. We've finally submitted one paper. To Science of all places. They didn't kick us out yet (though it is surprising they hadn't replied yet after more than three weeks. For those who don't know, Science and Nature have a two tier acceptance process. Most of the papers are rejected without peer review by the editor. This usually takes about a week. In case the editor decides the paper has potential, it is sent out to reviewers, but they usually let you know if this happens. So, the fact that we hadn't heard anything is fairly strange). I am fairly skeptical about our chances. My boss decided to try and go with a very specific short format, which is published one per issue. This makes it next to impossible to get through. Before sending it out to the journal, he sent the paper to few specialists in the field to see what they say. Most responses were very positive, but one of the guys warned us that it would be very hard to publish in this format. Anyway, even if the paper is eventually rejected, together with the supplementary material, we have a full paper to send to any other journal. Two more paper drafts were sent to our collaborators at Northwestern. These are fairly straightforward papers, which have good chances of being published in high level journals. I am guessing, they'll be out to journals fairly soon. We are also working on another paper, which should be done shortly. Now, you can understand why I was so busy lately :-) On the home front nothing changed much. I finished a draft divorce agreement with my lawyer and sent it to my ex. No response as of yet. In the meanwhile, she took the kids for a month of vacation in Israel. I would have loved to go, but ,unfortunately, couldn't. They've been gone for less than a week, and I already miss them. I have no idea how what things will be like when they move to North Carolina in August... Well, that's it for now. I will try to give more updates, but no promises :-)