IUPAC president for 2024 and 2025, Professor Ehud Keinan signed a proclamation which appeared in C&E News about funding of science. He emphasized that "to solve the global challenges of humanity we need investment in science at all levels" and that "policymakers would do well to identify and prioritize the problems but refrain from determining how to solve them".
The last meeting of the Council of the Hevesy György PhD School of Chemistry took place on February 28, 2025. The Council considered complete submissions of dissertations received by Ms. Éva Mercz on or before February 1, 2025.
As reported by C&EN and Retraction Watch, the Elsevier journal Chemosphere, which still appears as a Q1 chemistry journal on the list maintained by Scimago, is one of the titles which lately lost their impact factor, managed by Clarivate (Web of Science).
A committee of scholars in Finland, called JUFO, has decided to downgrade 271 scientific journals, including a number of chemistry titles, like Atoms, Molecules, and Polymers, from the publishers Frontiers and MDPI in their quality rating system to level 0 (these papers count in Finland the same as popular articles or scientific articles that haven’t been peer-reviewed). The expectation is that this move may discourage researchers from submitting manuscripts to these journals.
May this holiday season bring enjoyment, peace, light, knowledge, and open-mindedness to all the past and present doctoral candidates and supervisors of HKDI, as well as a happy and healthy 2025.