Welcome to our redesigned Journal. We hope you like its appearance and that it becomes as easily recognisable and familiar as our former design. Our Journal was founded back in 1957, when the board of Johnson Matthey decided to produce a publication, Platinum Metals Review, to support scientific research in the platinum group metals.

While our design has changed, the aims of Platinum Metals Review remain the same: to encourage the efforts of scientists and technologists around the world who use platinum group metals in the course of their daily work. The contents of the Journal have always been written by scientists for scientists, to support their endeavours, to demonstrate the vast range of industrial uses to which the platinum group metals can be put and to give scientists an opportunity to report on their efforts.

Over the years, the Journal has been able to follow the development of automobile catalysts, to watch the growth in the use of platinum drugs in anticancer treatment, to record progress in fuel cell technology, and latterly to report the rise of nanotechnology and combinatorial chemistry, and the great expansion of catalyst technology in general. Recently, chemistry has been most prominent in the subjects on which we publish papers, but whenever we have an opportunity we do publish papers on metallurgy and on some of the fundamental properties of the metals. Our papers and articles continue to be what you, our readers and authors, are interested in and write about: reviews of work, some new research, book reviews and conference reviews.

Of course, we are not able to cover all aspects of the science of the platinum group metals, but we do try. We seek to encourage both established researchers and those new to working with the platinum metals. Indeed, you are most likely to find your interests within the papers in the Abstracts section, which is produced each quarter from new literature searched for by my colleagues Pavla White and Keith White. In this section we aim to draw attention to some of the wide range of work being published. The New Patents literature, again, is chosen from the large numbers of patent applications published each quarter relating to new and improved industrial uses in platinum metals technology.

Platinum Metals Review is freely accessible on the Internet at http://www.matthey.com and http://www.turpin-distribution.com and has recently become available via ChemWeb. We will let you know as further facilities become available on our part of the Johnson Matthey website. The addresses of some Johnson Matthey offices around the world are on our inside back cover and further information can be found on the Johnson Matthey website. The Journal can be contacted by e-mail at jmpmr@matthey.com. We are always interested in hearing from our readers, listening to their views and meeting them at conferences.

Finally, our Journal size, which we have kept from the very first issue, was chosen to fit easily into a briefcase, and our last cover design was adapted to withstand coffee cup stains. Happily, these two features remain with our new design. It only remains for me, on behalf of Pavla and Keith to wish you all a very happy Millennium and much success with your work.