Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM) is an international, peer-reviewed, quarterly journal in materials science established in the year 2000. The unique feature of STAM is that from 2008 it has become an open access journal through the sponsorship by the National Institute for Materials Science. The journal remains by all means international, with its editors and referees located all around the world. However, the journal management is performed by the , which has launched in 2008 an initiative to drastically improve the prestige of STAM. From 2008, the journal is published on-line and printed by the Institute of Physics which maintains . The printed volumes are distributed free of charge by the NIMS and IOP editorial staff. Prior to 2008, the journal was published by Elsevier.

Scope

The journal is devoted to all aspects of materials science, including theoretical analysis, synthesis and processing, phase and structure analyses, characterization, properties, engineering and applications. The STAM covers advances in research on solids, liquids and colloids, with emphasis on the interdisciplinary nature of materials science and issues at the forefront of the field, such as nano-, bio- and ecomaterials.

Open access

The open-access formula of STAM practically means that the authors can publish their papers free of charge, and the readers can view, download and print them, again, free of charge. Besides, the authors enjoy very relaxed copyright obligations allowing them to post published papers on their web sites, share printed or electronic versions with colleagues, etc.

Currently (september 2008) STAM can be considered the only notable, truly open-access international journal in materials science. "Notable" here means impact factor above 1 and "truly open-access" that both the authors and readers bear no charges. It should be noted though that this situation might change rapidly and that both criteria are by no means discriminating.

Another interesting example of an open-access journal is the . This journal invites commercial advertisement to its site and to every paper published, and the authors, referees and publishes share the revenues attracted by the published article. On the positive side, financial reward does stimulate referees, which usually have only minor interest in assessing the papers. However, direct commercial interest can negatively affect the scientific content of the published research. Contrary to Journal of Materials, the referees, editors and authors of STAM do not have direct financial interest in the published articles.

STAM operation

Articles are submitted to STAM through its . They are first evaluated by managing editors and then by the assigned associated editor. All those editors are well-established scientists freely exercising their right to reject the manuscript editorially or request additional explanations from the authors. In fact, more than half of the currently submitted papers are rejected editorially. Selected papers are further evaluated by at least two referees. Accepted papers are corrected by the English correctors and published on-line in the pdf format by the Institute of Physics as soon as possible.

STAM has no page limits which is convenient for reviews. For example, the length of a recently published review is 96 journal pages"Challenges and breakthroughs in recent research on self-assembly". This review paper is also the most downloaded STAM article, with >5000 downloads within a few months of the year 2008.

Together with a paper itself, the authors can publish additional information, such as multimedia files.

From 2008, the journal publishes 4 issues per year containing about hundred articles. Many of those are devoted to specific topics such as conference proceedings, invited reviews, etc. Special issues however do not delay publication of regular articles, for which a separate section is reserved every journal issue.

The impact factor, a measure of how many citations a journal generates in other refereed papers, of STAM in the year 2007 is 1.27, as measured by the Thomson Institute for Scientific Information. This value however reflects the 2005-2006 period, i.e., before the open-access stage of the journal. The impact factor is projected to rapidly increase after 2009.