Did you know we’re turning 80? As we kick off our 80th volume, we want to reflect on where the journal started in 1945. When the National Association of Corrosion Engineers formed in 1944, one of the first committees established was the Publications Committee, which launched CORROSION journal the next year. What started as a quarterly journal that published a mix of technical articles, association news, and advertisements for corrosion labs, field technologies, and products grew into the monthly peer-reviewed journal that it is today.
Back in the 1940s, the journal focused mainly on corrosion in the oil and gas industry, a far cry from the diverse industries, materials, technique advancements, and corrosion technologies covered today. A single issue of CORROSION can include topics such as biomedical corrosion; corrosion in the aerospace, transportation, oil, or other energy industries; additively manufactured alloys; compositionally concentrated alloys; smart coatings; new corrosion inhibitors; and predictive modeling methods applied to forecast corrosion damage and enable mitigation across many length and time scales. As we have learned more about how surface science, environmental chemistry, and metallurgical factors impact the triggers, drivers, dependencies, and mechanisms of corrosion, CORROSION has quickly reported on such current progress thanks to our many authors and their attention to these issues.
Moreover, progress in corrosion science and technology is now disseminated in a variety of ways enabled by the different types of articles and other communication platforms CORROSION now uses. The implementation of invited critical reviews, corrosion communications, technical notes, special issues, and detailed science and engineering articles is intended to provide many avenues to report on current trends, emerging issues, and legacy materials with equal opportunity for all authors. CORROSION has published more than 20 special issues since 2012 on topics as diverse as concrete, magnesium corrosion, and emerging materials, and was twice home to the multi-national “Allied Nations” Department of Defense symposium special issue. In addition, urgent corrosion situations and issues requiring a “call to action” are now covered in our perspectives and editorials. These were started back in the 1940s and have continued periodically over the years, with more frequency over the past decade. Various forms of open access options are also now available to increase the accessibility of research articles.
Additionally, starting in 2016, journal staff launched social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter (now X), LinkedIn, and Kudos, to reach the corrosion community in new ways. Staff also introduced podcasts on issues of interest to the community. CORROSION now hosts a monthly episode relating to articles published in the journal or topics affecting the research community. These innovations have enhanced how the Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP), a not-for-profit technical society, continues to provide information to the corrosion community.
New approaches enabled through data informatics and artificial intelligence are also garnering attention. We continually face a combination of old and new challenges, such as lead in water pipes, how to prolong the lifetime of infrastructure far beyond the original intent, what to do when regulation changes impact the use of a material or chemical, and how to take advantage of a wealth of corrosion data by means such as artificial intelligence to find relationships between the multitude of factors influencing corrosion behavior. Sustainability, clean abundant energy, and water are growing issues that are likely to receive even more attention in the future. On the horizon is the vexing sustainability issue and how the corrosion community can help prevent scarcity of metallic materials due to increasing demand.
This year we will further explore some of these challenges in technical articles, perspectives, and podcast discussions. We will build on the journal’s foundation, where the need for discussion, problem solving, and solutions brought a group of 11 pipeline engineers together in 1944, and continue to provide the world’s greatest space for corrosion scientists and engineers to share their research and move the industry forward.
As the scientific journal of AMPP, we look forward to sharing our valuable content with the broader corrosion and protective coatings communities.
