The impulse to launch Chemistry came in 1993 during a discussion at a conference in Munich between Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Lehn, Heinrich Nöth, then the President of the German Chemical Society (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh), and Peter Gölitz, the Editor of Angewandte Chemie for over 20 years. Together the GDCh and Wiley-VCH (the publishers of Angewandte Chemie) quickly got the project off the ground. Initially Chemistry was published bound with Angewandte Chemie. The number of articles increased rapidly, and from 1997 onwards Chemistry appeared as an independent journal. In an Editorial in the very first issue in April 1995 Peter Gölitz and Jean-Marie Lehn, the first chairman of the Edi-torial Board, wrote that Chemistry is designed to be "European in spirit and international in appeal. Looking at the journal today one can see that this aim has been achieved," observed a convinced Lattes. The high numbers of articles received from the outset from the USA, Japan, China, and other non-European countries also confirms this. In its first ten years, Chemistry has published more than 40,000 pages and over 4,000 articles, and all this with a rejection rate of almost 50%.
Chemistry published by the Weinheim publishing house Wiley-VCH, is currently in the hands of its Editor Dr. Neville Compton and is owned by the Editorial Union of Chemical So-cieties (EUChemSoc), a consortium of the chemical societies of 13 European countries: Bel-gium, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Swe-den, Czech Republic, and Hungary. Following on from Chemistry, Peter Gölitz together with some of the same societies launched two other European journals, ChemBioChem and ChemPhysChem, in 2000 and is still their Editor today. For years, most leading scientific journals have come out of the USA – the fact that this is not the case in the field of chemistry is in large part due to Peter Gölitz.
"From 2006 we will extend the range of European chemical journals still further with ChemMedChem, which will be devoted to medicinal chemistry," says Gölitz. "The world of science publishing is as stimulating and competitive as science itself, and that is its appeal!"
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