Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Digital Discovery April 2026 Newsletter

Welcome to the latest Digital Discovery newsletter! We’re pleased to share a round-up of the latest journal news, as well as information on our themed collections and upcoming events. Get future updates directly to your inbox with our email alerts. Sign up here.

Latest News

Our 2026 #RSCPoster conference took place on LinkedIn for 24 hours, from 3-4 March. We’re pleased to share the winner in the #RSCDigital category is Alister Goodfellow for the poster XYZ to Chemical Insight: TS analysis, Molecular Graphs and Visualisation!

This year’s runner-up is Stefania Monteleone, who presented MApyl: Evotec’s HPC workflow automation system.

Congratulations to the winners, and our thanks to all of the contributors for their excellent posters. Find out about the winners in other categories on our web page: 2026 #RSCPoster winners.

We were pleased to highlight the contributions of women in accelerated science, with a special article collection which you can read here: Celebrating International Women’s Day 2026: Women in Digital Discovery.

Themed Collections

Slide showing the profiles of new Digital Discovery themed collection and profiles of the guest editors

We’re pleased to announce that our themed collection of articles from the participants of the 2023 and 2024 Accelerate Conferences is now online! This collection is Guest Edited by Prof. Janine George (Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany), Prof. Claudiane Ouellet-Plamondon (École de Technologie Supérieure, Canada) and Prof. Kristofer Reyes (University at Buffalo, United States).

Produced in collaboration with the Acceleration Consortium, organisers of the Accelerate Conference, this collection features paper that span innovations in algorithms, decision-making, and integrated self-driving laboratories—from efficient experimental design and probabilistic programming to orchestration frameworks coordinating sensing, actuation, and learning. Collectively, they illustrate new principles for accelerating and scaling discovery. Read the collection for more. We look forward to featuring the contributors to the 2025 conference in a themed collection that is already under way, to be published in 2025-2026.

Events

Our Executive Editor Anna Rulka (below, centre) Digital Discovery represented Digital Discovery at the Second international symposium on High-Throughput Catalysts Design (HTCD 2026) in Lille on 30-31 March. We joined Reaction Chemistry & Engineering and Catalysis Science & Technology in sponsoring awards at the meeting.

A photograph of 5 people

Our congratulations to Paco Laveille (ETH Zurich, not pictured) for the best plenary lecture award; Samuel Gleason (Entalpic, right) for the best oral presentation; and Sara Arteche Echeverría (Sanofi and UCCS, second from right) for the best poster!

The journals are also collaborating on a themed collection featuring work from the participants of the meeting. Find out more here, and look out for information on the collection when the articles are published this year.

We recently supported the RSC CICAG–RSC SERAC RSC Analyticode meeting at Burlington House, London, and are delighted to announce that Kefeng Huang from the University of York won the best poster prize for their work titled “TARMAC: A Taxonomy for Robot Manipulation in Chemistry”. Our congratulations to Kefeng!

Digital Discovery and Reaction Chemistry & Engineering are pleased to support prizes for best talk and best poster at this year’s 9th Machine Learning and AI in (Bio)Chemical Engineering Conference taking place in Cambridge, UK on 6-7 July. The MABC is a highlight of the UK conference calendar, targeting developers and advanced users of AI/ML within the context of chemistry and biochemical engineering. Visit the web page to find out more and register.

A group of RSC journals including Digital Discovery will be sponsoring prizes for the best posters at the 11th Conference on Quantum Information and Quantum Control (CQIQC-XI) taking place August 17-21 2026 in Toronto. We join Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, Materials Horizons, Materials Advances, and Nanoscale Advances in wishing the best to all the participants in this cross-disciplinary meeting! Following the conference, we’ll also be inviting the participants to contribute to a themed collection across many of these journals – look out for more information soon.

Updated 17 April 2026 – We’re currently working with the CQIQC on a revised plan for support of the meeting. Watch this space and the event web site for updates!

Follow our channels below to keep up to date on the events we’re supporting in 2026.

Submit your work to Digital Discovery

Find out more about Digital Discovery on our webpage, where you can also find our author guidelines. Digital Discovery has received a 2024 Impact Factor of 5.6, has an article acceptance rate of 67%, and provides a first decision on articles sent to peer review in an average of 45 days.

Publishing open access with RSC journals unlocks the full potential of your research – bringing increased visibility, wider readership and higher citation potential to your work. As a not-for-profit organisation serving the chemical sciences community, we ensure that our article processing charge (APC) remains the most competitive of major publishers. More details can be found here and the APC for Digital Discovery is £2200. You can also use our journal finder tool to check if your institution currently has an agreement with the RSC that may entitle you to a discount of the APC.

Stay Connected:

Postdoc or early career researcher? Interested in building your peer review experience and helping improve open data at Digital Discovery? Consider becoming a data reviewer. Find out more on our blog post.

Follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky for new articles and the latest news from Digital Discovery and related journals at the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Introducing “Commit”, a mini article for dynamic reporting of incremental improvements to previous scholarly work

Digital Discovery is pleased to introduce a new article type, “Commit”, a mini article for dynamic reporting of incremental improvements to previous scholarly work. This new type of article allows the community to share changes to work published in Digital Discovery articles, whether this is one’s own work or another’s. We see Commits as citable articles describing the changes made to a project, which could be a full manuscript, or an open hardware or software project published in the journal.

Some examples of Commits could include:

  • Hardware articles: a device which has the same motivation and use but has an improvement in capabilities or construction.
  • Software articles: addition of features or improvement of capabilities.
  • Data: incorporating additional data while keeping the underlying schema the same (for example, new data which has been added since the last article).

Commits are expected to be shorter than a full article, although there is no rigid page limit. We expect that most of the improvements will be present in associated code/data repositories or supporting information associated with the work.

To find out more about preparing, submitting, and citing Commit articles, read our Editorial at DOI: 10.1039/D4DD90053G. We welcome queries or comments by email to the journal’s Editorial Office at digitaldiscovery-rsc@rsc.org.

“Formalizing chemical physics using the Lean theorem prover” featured on Breaking Math

Josephson et al.‘s paper “Formalizing chemical physics using the Lean theorem prover” is featured on a new episode of the Breaking Math podcast! Find it at the links below or in your favourite podcatcher.

Apple Podcasts

Spotify podcasts

Read the open access article here.

Dr Giodarno Mancini wins the mid-2023 Digital Discovery data reviewer draw!

We’re pleased to announce that Dr Giordano Mancini is the winner of the Digital Discovery mug in our most recent data reviewer prize draw. Congratulations Giordano!

A Digital Discovery-branded mug

If you would like to join our data reviewer pool and have the chance of winning our next mug, please see our earlier blog post for information.

Research infographic – Plot2Spectra: an automatic spectra extraction tool

We’re pleased to share a new research infographic describing Plot2Spectra, a tool for digitising published spectroscopy data, by Jiang, Chan et al. in issue 5:

A research infographic describing the linked paper

Read the full open access article here:

Plot2Spectra: an automatic spectra extraction tool

Weixin Jiang, Kai Li, Trevor Spreadbury, Eric Schwenker, Oliver Cossairt and Maria K. Y. Chan, Digital Discovery, 2022, 1, 719–731. DOI: 10.1039/D1DD00036E

Research infographic – “Data mining crystallization kinetics”

Our newest research infographic shares work by Brown et al. from Digital Discovery issue 5, on a crystallisation classification system and its corresponding database:

An infogrpahic describing the research in the linked paper

Read the full open-access article here:

Data mining crystallization kinetics

Research infographic – “Machine learning enabling high-throughput and remote operations at large-scale user facilities”

Digital Discovery issue 4 features work by Daniel Olds, et al. on machine learning approaches designed for non-ML-expert light source users. Find out more in the infographic below:

A research infographic describing the linked paper

Read the full open-access article here:

“Machine learning enabling high-throughput and remote operations at large-scale user facilities”

Research infographic – “NewtonNet: a Newtonian message passing network for deep learning of interatomic potentials and forces”

An infographic describing the research in the linked paper

Digital Discovery issue 3 features work by Teresa Head-Gordon, et al. on NewtonNet, summarised in this new infographic!

Read the full article here:

“NewtonNet: a Newtonian message passing network for deep learning of interatomic potentials and forces”

Research infographic – “Self-learning entropic population annealing for interpretable materials design”

An infographic summarising the paper linked to in this post

Digital Discovery issue 3 features work by Ryo Tamura, Koji Tsuda, et al. on SLEPA, summarised in this new infographic!

Read the full article here:

“Self-learning entropic population annealing for interpretable materials design”

Jiawen Li, Jinzhe Zhang, Ryo Tamura and Koji Tsuda, Digital Discovery, 2022, 1, 295–302, DOI: 10.1039/D1DD00043H

Research infographic – “RegioML: predicting the regioselectivity of electrophilic aromatic substitution reactions using machine learning”

An infographic describing the research in the paper at DOI 10.1039/D1DD00032B

We’re excited to share this new infographic about RegioML, work that was published in Digital Discovery issue 2. Read the entire open-access article at:

“Consideration of predicted small-molecule metabolites in computational toxicology”

Nicolai Ree, Andreas H. Göller and Jan H. Jensen, Digital Discovery, 2022, 1, 108–114, DOI:10.1039/D1DD00032B