“A proposta de se ter uma revista como meio de divulgação dos trabalhos técnicos e científicos na área de polímeros foi o estopim que acendeu a grande ideia de se criar a ABPol” (The proposal to edit a journal to publish scientific and technical works in the area of polymers was the ignition of the fuse that started the great idea of creating ABPol). With those words, the first president of ABPol, Silvio Manrich, began the first editorial of the first issue of Polímeros, published in November 1991. This historic fact tells us that the creation of ABPol was a consequence of the idea of editing a journal and not the opposite. At that time the Brazilian polymers community was small and there were few Brazilian scientific journals, none of them exclusively dedicated to the area of polymers. This small community reacted promptly, submitting their manuscripts to Polímeros, from 6 in the first year to 164 in 2015. In total, 1832 manuscripts have been submitted to Polímeros since 1991 and 1229 were published. Manuscripts also came from abroad; the majority from Colombia and France (22 each), followed by USA (19), Portugal (14) and Germany (13). After 2013 the number of papers published in English increased with a consequent decrease in the number of papers in Portuguese and Spanish. English is the actual official language for submissions and, after 2017, Polimeros will be 100% in English. This encouraged submissions by a large number of scientists from Colombia, China, India, Iran and Turkey.

Since 1991, many members of ABPol and of the Direction Board contributed for the shaping and consolidation of this journal. Many took part at the Editorial Committee or Editorial Council in these 25 years. All, with no exception, contributed to our journal. It is also important to remember those members of the ABPol staff, who worked hard to help editing the issues and in its dissemination. They played a paramount role in the whole process.

Several steps are involved in publishing a scientific journal. Perhaps the most important is the evaluation and selection of the manuscripts for publication. For this task, the Editorial Committee always had the commitment of the Brazilian scientific community members and of many foreign scientists. In the last years, we also have foreign scientists actively participating to the Editorial Committee and in the revision of submitted manuscripts.

Apart from the scientific level, gathering financial support for the journal was also part of the hard work. For a long time, funding from governmental agencies supplied the main costs. Preparing the funding applications, writing reports and account reports, relayed mainly upon individual initiative of the Editorial Committee members. In addition, private companies, who advertised in the covers and internal pages of Polímeros, also played an important financial role. Those who most contributed to Polímeros were: DPUnion, SABIC/GE Plastics South America, Braskem, AXPlásticos and Lanxess.

In the last years, there was a gradual reduction of the official financial support and now authors of accepted papers cover part of the costs in the form of a page charge. Another consequence of the financial support depletion was the discontinuation of the printed version in 2015. Following an international tendency, the journal’s internet site publishes the accepted articles, with their DOI numbers. This shortened the publication time, increased the Brazilian and foreign access to the articles and will probably increase the number of citations. Presently, the foreign countries that most access our articles are: Portugal, China, USA, Russia and Colombia.

Nowadays, Polímeros is indexed in several international databases and in SciELO. However, the biggest step in the history of Polímeros was, with no doubt, its inclusion at the ISI Web of Knowledge- Web of Science and the evaluation of its impact factor after 2008. After 2015, English became the official language for submission to Polímeros and ScholarOne™ the platform used for the submission process. This motivated an increased number of accesses and submissions from foreign scientists.

In the near future, we expect a tendency to increase the submission of high scientific level manuscripts, internet accesses, citations and the impact factor of Polímeros.

We congratulate all the polymeric community for these 25 years of dissemination of the polymer science worldwide and wish long life to Polímeros.

Marco Aurelio De Paoli
President of the Editorial Council of Polímeros