Molecular Diversity, the first journal of Combinatorial Chemistry, is now a reputed and respected scientific publication which has already completed its 21 volumes. The journal has seen some ups and downs in its performance. In 2018, it has received an impact factor of 2.229 which is a respectable number. Guillermo Morales has served as the Editor-in-Chief of this journal for the last 11 years. Due to several new professional commitments, Dr. Morales has passed the baton to us to lead this journal. We are confident that we will move forward to further raise the standard of the Journal in coming years and return to the high impact status with an impact factor of > 3.0, which the journal was able to achieve in 2010. In order to accomplish this, we have planned to implement a number of changes in the area coverage and manuscript handling.

For capturing the interest of the changing audience and submitting authors, we have revisited the scope of the Journal, and necessary changes are being made in the Classification scheme and required Keywords of the papers being submitted to the Journal. This will also help in assigning manuscripts to an appropriate Editor. In general, synthesis/experimental papers will be assigned to HYL and computational/modeling papers to KR. We will give a special attention to reduce the handling time of each paper so that we can arrive at a speedy decision without compromising the quality. Each paper will initially be evaluated by an Editor-in-Chief. If the quality of science and/or presentation is not found to be optimal, it may immediately be rejected, without assigning it to an Associate Editor and/or Reviewers. This quick decision will prevent unnecessary wastage of time of authors. Apart from the scientific quality of the articles, the authors are also expected to ensure that the submitted articles should comply with the Journal requirements with respect to format, style, and correctness of language. If there is a significant problem in the quality of language, a paper may be returned or even rejected in spite of that the paper is otherwise technically sound. We also encourage authors to carefully check the Instruction for Authors to comply with all Journal requirements. For example, papers reporting synthesis of new compounds should include spectral characterization data of the required number or fraction of synthesized compounds as Supporting Materials. Papers reporting animal experiments and/or trials using human subjects must comply with all ethical requirements. Papers reporting computational studies and cheminformatic modeling (including quantitative structure–activity relationship models) addressing issues like molecular diversity, molecular similarity, and molecular complexity must upload all raw data and data sets as Supporting Materials. For the medicinal chemistry-related articles, the purity data of final compounds are required in the Supporting Information.

We plan to organize special issues on hot topics to further increase visibility of the Journal. We specifically seek review articles and perspectives in the areas of contemporary interest.

We are also updating our Editorial Board. Dr. Jose L Medina-Franco from Mexico and Dr. Wenhao Hu from China have recently joined as Associate Editors. We will also get another Associate Editor. We will also update the list of our Honorary Advisory Editors and expand the existing Editorial Board of the Journal. We are also considering some changes in the Journal webpages such as inclusion of Graphical Abstract for each paper. We will also select one paper in each issue as the Editors’ choice, and the full text of this paper will be made available for free for some time. We will also include images from a selected paper of each issue as Cover Images. A short biography will be included in the publication for the authors of review and perspective articles, the research articles of Editors’ choice papers, and the articles selected for Cover images. We hope that these initiatives will help motivating authors to submit their best results to this Journal. We invite suggestions from our authors and readers for further improvement of this Journal.