November 18, 2008

Also appeared in print Dec. 1, 2008, p. 65

ACS News

ACS Launches New Journals Website

Subscribers will find it easier to search and browse ACS journals

Linda Wang

Beginning this week, subscribers to the online editions of American Chemical Society journals will discover new features and improved functionality when they visit ACS???s journals website (pubs.acs.org), which hosts the society???s 34 peer-reviewed research journals.

Brian Crawford, president of ACS Publications, calls the launch of the new website a ???significant accomplishment??? for the society and one that is ???integral to our commitment to be the world???s most trusted source of the comprehensive knowledge needed to cultivate the chemists of tomorrow.???

The new website, which took two years to develop, features enhanced searching and browsing capabilities. Users will be able to narrow their searches to specific journals, for example. Searches can be expanded by including the root terms of search words, such as searching for all terms that include the root ???nano.???

Users can also scroll through all the figures within an article directly from the table of contents page. They can view enhanced full-text PDFs that contain live links to references and figures that can be enlarged with a click of the mouse. ???We???re aiming to provide users with a more interactive experience,??? says Jonathan J. Morgan, ACS assistant director of Web innovation and production.

More visual elements have also been incorporated into the website. For example, each journal homepage highlights figures from its recent noteworthy papers. A new figure browser in the full-text HTML version also allows users to scroll through larger versions of all figures from the paper, and it offers the option of downloading high-resolution versions of each image.

The new website is part of an evolutionary process. ???Technology innovation and measured change are essential to the long-term success of any organization,??? says John R. Sullivan, ACS chief information officer. ???Looking back to 2005, it was clear that the society needed to update and replace the international information systems and underlying technology that had supported the online delivery of journals ever since the inception of the ACS Web editions in 1995.???

Sullivan says the advancement ???promises to facilitate many more publishing innovations,??? such as richer linking and integration to other ACS resources, such as the new ACS Member Network, for example.

For a demonstration of the new website???s features, visit pubs.acs.org/flashdemo.

Chemical & Engineering News

ISSN 0009-2347

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