Chemistry World has spoken to Reaction Chemistry & Engineering Editorial Board Chair Professor Klavs Jensen about his work in the field of flow chemistry and continuous processing, culminating in the recent construction of an on-demand continuous flow pharmaceutical production platform with colleagues from MIT.
This achievement was made possible because of close collaboration between chemists and chemical engineers. As a journal, Reaction Chemistry & Engineering seeks to foster clear communication and knowledge sharing between the two disciplines that may lead to future endeavours such as this.
‘It makes sense to form a journal that allows the community from both sides to interact. So we want chemical engineers to publish papers that are interesting to the chemists and chemists to publish papers that have some engineering content and so will also be interesting to the engineers’, explains Professor Jensen, discussing his hopes for the journal. ‘We’d like to have something in between, that actually highlights from both sides what is the contribution in terms of understanding and developing new reactions, being able to optimize those, and understanding the kinetics. But also what does it take to run those – and so we bring together the two disciplines.’
Professor Jensen is convinced that a new journal is needed to do this: ‘Existing journals have reviewers that determine what is published, and they’ve developed their own communities. So it’s much harder to take an existing journal and change the course than it is to redefine, to really set a new goal and create a journal that satisfies the needs from both sides.’
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