I have personally attended nearly all of the Materials Research Society exhibits over the last ten years. They run two big meetings with exhibits every year—one in the spring, right after Easter, and the other in the fall, right after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Together, they’re the two most important meetings for materials science, and also very well run (thanks to Mary Kaufold and Donna Waterson at the MRS).

At this year’s spring meeting, though, we tried something new—we added a strong presence for SpringerOpen at the Springer booth. The Springer booth—filled with the most noteworthy of Springer’s new materials books (Springer is by far the largest book publisher in the discipline) draws tons of traffic—so what better place to tell the materials science community about open access, and about SpringerOpen’s aggressive and growing materials portfolio?

Most importantly, in addition to our spiffy new signage, together with our friends from Papers (www.papersapp.com), we were able to quickly share article collections from our journals with just a single link! You can check out these collections at Facebook.com/SpringerOpn and LinkedIn.com/SpringerOpen.

SpringerOpen and materials science

In an important way, SpringerOpen got started with materials science. Even before we launched the SpringerOpen imprint, we launched what at the time was Springer’s first fully OA journal, Nanoscale Research Letters, and we launched it at two consecutive MRS meetings in 2007. The journal has gone on to routinely publish over 1,000 articles per year, with an Impact Factor of 2.48.

And together with society partners, we’ve also launched fully-sponsored OA journals, like Materials for Renewable and Sustainable Energy. (The playlist below, with the co-Editor Enrico Traversa, runs a little less than five minutes.)