Sarah Everts from C&EN was kind enough to ask me for a comment about Angewandte Chemie to include in her article about its 125th anniversary. My quote is in the third paragraph from the end, but as with all these types of things, not everything that I said could be used and Sarah picked out the most appropriate bit for the piece (and checked with me first).

Just for the record, however, here is the full comment that I sent to Sarah in response to her request, noting just what an impact I think Angewandte has had on chemistry publishing:

In many ways, Angewandte has blazed a trail when it comes to the ‘how’ of publishing research in chemistry – but also scientific publishing in general it could be argued. When researching an editorial for Nature Chemistry on the origins of graphical abstracts, it should have come as no surprise when the earliest examples I could find were from Angewandte Chemie. They started as a regular feature in the German edition in 1976 (I think) and then appeared in the International edition the following year. It took many years for other publishers to catch up. Another innovation in chemistry publishing championed by Angewandte were the striking images that graced the front cover of the printed journal (when all there was was the printed journal). In the days when Angewandte were putting nice pictures on the front of each issue, rival publishers still had plain (and somewhat dull) covers that, in some cases, even included the start of the table-of-contents (which was just text); again, many chemistry journals were slow to follow this lead. Finally, if memory serves me correctly, it was Angewandte that first made chemistry publishing colourful. While others were producing issues in black and white (with perhaps some greyscale thrown in for good measure), colour images were regularly gracing the pages of Angewandte Chemie. There is no doubt that many of the publishing innovations pioneered by Angewandte have inspired other journals since. As a graduate student and postdoc it was a journal I aspired to publish in and now as an editor of a competing journal it is one of the first places I look when I’m searching for interesting work to highlight in Nature Chemistry that we didn’t publish ourselves.

[Update — here’s a link to the Nature Chemistry Editorial that I mention above]