Now in its second year of publication, NPG Asia Materials continues to establish itself as a timely, multi-disciplinary journal covering the breadth of materials sciences including the design, synthesis, structure, properties and performance of materials investigated from both fundamental and practical perspectives. The scope of the journal is in itself a reflection of how the materials sciences, while continuing to grow as a field in its own right, also draws on and increasingly contributes to more traditional disciplines — from physics, chemistry and biology, to medicine and engineering.

This is the third quarterly edition of original, peer-reviewed review articles to be published in NPG Asia Materials. These reviews are intended to be authoritative, balanced surveys of recent developments in a particular research field and are the next important step in the development of the journal which will see us publishing original research articles by 2011.

As NPG Asia Materials is read by scientists with diverse backgrounds, and coming from both an academic and an industrial perspective, it is particularly important that the articles are accessible to a wide audience, and efforts are made at all the stages of the article’s journey to realize that goal.

In this spirit, we ask our authors and reviewers to keep non-specialists readers in mind when both writing and reviewing articles. We realize that most of our authors will be more familiar with writing articles for researchers sharing the same background rather than the broader audience of NPG Asia Materials, which is why our editorial team provides comments on how to improve the readability of the reviews. One way in which this can be achieved is through the addition of paragraphs that introduce key concepts, and any specialized terminology, to non-specialist readers. Similarly, as a picture is often worth a thousand words, we also ask authors to pay particular attention to the way in which they construct the graphical figures that accompany the reviews. Including schematic representations of the phenomena, chemical structures or devices discussed often goes a long way to improving navigation and understanding of an article — indeed if we are being honest, many of us would probably admit to jumping straight to the schemes, figures, graphs and other tables before going on to tackle the text of an article or review.

Furthermore, we are aware that non-native English speakers also face an additional language challenge when writing articles — this is perhaps even truer for reviews than original research articles. We therefore encourage our authors to show the article to a native-English speaking group member or colleague before submission. However, unlike many other journals, each of our reviews are copy-edited by professional, expert copy editors who are all native English speakers to ensure maximum readability and clarity. Last but not least, we pay particular attention to the abstracts of the reviews. This section is the most-read paragraph of the article, and it is important that it is written in an accessible way while giving an overview of the background of that particular research field, before explaining the developments discussed in the article.

We could not have made it even this far without the efforts of all our authors and reviewers so we would like to thank all those who have embarked with us on the early steps of this exciting journey by submitting and reviewing articles. If you are currently not one of our review authors but would like to be considered, don’t be shy. NPG Asia Materials can be contacted by email (authors@asia-materials.com) with further details available from our website (www.natureasia.com/asia-materials).

Reflecting the wide scope of the Journal, in this issue we look into the structures, properties and practical device application of materials that have attracted particular attention over the past few years. On page 54, Takakazu Yamamoto from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan presents the properties conferred on π-conjugated polythiophene polymers by their incorporation into molecular architectures. This is followed on page 61 by an account by Ce-Wen Nan and co-workers from Tsinghua University in China of the particular characteristics of nanocomposites that combine and couple ferroelectric and magnetic characteristics. Finally, on page 69, Haibo Wang and Donghang Yan from the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry in China discuss recent progress in our understanding of the organic materials that have recently shown great promise for replacing conventional inorganic heterostructures and building a new generation of field-effect transistors.

In addition to all this, NPG Asia Materials continues to highlight the best materials research from the Asia-Pacific region published in the recent literature. Research highlights are published weekly on the NPG Asia Materials website, covering the latest developments in materials science in a timely, informative and easy-to-digest format. As a sample of the online content, featured highlights from the January–March quarter are presented at the front of this issue. All of the content is available online, free of charge, and is only a click of a mouse button away. While on the website, we encourage you to take a minute to register for free weekly email alerts, which bring the newest content on the NPG Asia Materials website straight to your inbox. We also welcome feedback from our readers. Why not let us know what you think by emailing us at editor@asia-materials.com? We look forward to hearing from you.