RSC International News

14th International Summary

Charlotte — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:37:19 +0000

As part of the 2007 General Assembly, some of the international representatives and sections were invited to attend a special one-day event at Burlington House. This session allowed international delegates to learn more about the RSC’s international activities through a series of presentations as well as providing an opportunity for delegates to voice ideas and suggestions for the future via group discussions. In addition, the international delegates were able to visit Burlington House and its Library and Information Centre.

Twelve RSC international delegates representing Belgium, China, Hong Kong, Israel, France, UAE, West India, South Africa, Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Singapore were invited to the event. They were welcomed by Richard Pike who also gave a brief speech about the International Cooperation Agreement’s and the RSC international strategy. Delegates were then invited to a presentation on International RSC Membership including an outline of the RSC international strategy by Andrew Scott. Alejandra Palermo also presented the new Pan Africa Project and her involvement with other large RSC projects

Delegates discussed many issues including individual country service packages and support for members in organising overseas conferences. The availability of books to international regions and pricing at local rates was also discussed. The high cost of shipping prompted a discussion regarding collection schemes of books and journals in the UK which could then be dispatched internationally in one large shipment.

Overall, the feedback from international delegates was very positive. Those present discussed how the RSC could improve on their existing communication between staff and reps to help further improve the relationships in place. This will allow reps and members to be fully supported within their country. The full report from the General Assembly will be available on the website in the New Year.

13th International Summary

Charlotte — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:57:22 +0000

Next week sees the third RSC General Assembly, which will take place on Thursday 15th November and Friday 16th November. This year the meeting will be held at the Birmingham Hilton Metropole Hotel. This meeting will be attended by Council members and representatives of local sections and interest groups. Delegates will be representing the UK, China, Israel, Belgium, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Singapore, France, Pakistan, India and South Africa.

The two day meeting allows delegates to discuss and debate topics, as well as input to a range of topics including advice on RSC strategies, policies and activities. It also gives the opportunity for Council members to hear the views and opinions of our members. The RSC international representatives that have been invited to the General Assembly will get the chance to meet RSC staff at a special gathering on Wednesday 14th November, as well as getting the chance to meet Council members and discuss topical issues. The Gala Awards ceremony and dinner will form part of the General Assembly and will celebrate outstanding contributions of chemical scientists.

Feedback from the General Assembly will be available on the website shortly. Feedback from the General Assembly 2006 can be viewed at the following link:
http://www.rsc.org/Membership/Memberzone/BoardsCommittees/GA/GA2006.asp

12th International Summary

Charlotte — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:01:58 +0000

There have been a few changes made to the International Blog: we have added more links (including international agreements and other useful links). The International Blog allows you to give feedback so that we can help develop the site to be as useful as possible, as well as allowing you to express your ideas and suggestions about items posted.

In August the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) Congress and General Assembly was held in Turin. IUPAC is a voluntary organisation which aims to advance the worldwide aspects of the chemical sciences and to contribute to the application of chemistry in the service of mankind. The RSC is actively trying to increase the awareness of IUPAC in the younger community and so this year six Young Observers were invited to attend and be involved on all decision-making discussions. These young observers included the 2007 IUPAC prize winner Dr Euan Kay from Edinburgh, who was awarded best PhD thesis for his work on Mechanized Molecules. Professor Tony West from Sheffield (retiring president of Division II Inorganic Chemistry) spoke about a number of new elements from 112-118, which are being assessed before being named. Professor Jung-II Jin (Korea) was elected as the new president of the IUPAC committee and the new vice president is Professor Nicole Moreau (France). Professor John Cornish (Ireland) was elected treasurer. The deliberations of this meeting will be published in future issues of Chemistry International. The next congress and general assembly will be held in Glasgow in 2009 hosted by the RSC.
http://www.rsc.org/ConferencesAndEvents/RSCConferences/IUPAC2009/index.asp

11th International Summary

Charlotte — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 13:07:13 +0000

Last month RSC Publishing conducted a tour of top US East Coast universities. Emma Wilson (Publisher), Carol Stanier (Editor of Journal of Materials Chemistry and Soft Matter) and Janet Freshwater (Senior Books Commissioning Editor) visited 7 universities, including MIT, Harvard, Cornell and Northwestern to talk to faculty members, post-docs, graduate students and librarians about our high profile journals and books programme. The aims of the roadshow were threefold, to talk to US scientists about their publishing needs, to promote our new enhanced online HTML content and to give tips and information to younger scientists about how to structure and write a journal article.

At all the universities visited we gave a demo and gathered feedback on our enhanced HTML content, a project that takes electronic publishing to a new level and allows data in online RSC journal papers to be read, indexed and intelligently searched by machine. This initiative, coined ‘Project Prospect’, is the first of its kind from a primary research publisher and allows readers to click on named compounds and scientific concepts in the HTML electronic journal article to download structures, understand topics, or link through to electronic databases. The feedback that we received was extremely enthusiastic, both scientists and librarians immediately saw how useful the tool was and how it could help support their work. They were also able to give us ideas about how we could further improve the service and add even more features. Alongside this project, the RSC Publishing recently launched an eBook collection including over 750 titles. The feedback on this collection was very positive with many ideas on how it could be developed to be even more useful to users.

The tips on how to get published was well received and we were asked numerous questions about how best to present work to editors and referees. People were especially interested in how to write titles so they would be “more” visible within search engines like Google. Indeed all of the sessions were lively and provided an excellent forum for exchanging ideas and information; we learnt a lot as well, so all in all a successful and enjoyable trip.

Registration is now open for ‘Faraday Discussion 139: The Importance of Polymer Science for Biological Systems’. Faraday Discussions are unique international scientific conferences which focus on rapidly developing areas of physical chemistry. They have a special format in which papers are distributed to all participants in advance of the conference and almost all the meeting is devoted to discussion of the papers. In this way, any participant at the conference has the opportunity to make a major contribution, and the papers and discussion are published. This meeting will take place in York, UK on 26 – 28 March 2008. For more details visit the website: www.rsc.org/FD139.

10th International Summary

Charlotte — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:04:59 +0000

Recently John Haynes (RSC’s new Editorial Director) was in Addis Ababa shortly after they celebrated their Millennium (the Ethiopian calendar is more than seven years behind ours) to run a Strategic Online Journals workshop organised by INASP (International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications) and Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Ethiopia. It was BCSE’s 20th anniversary and the workshop was attended by their staff as well as staff from 10 other journals based across sub-Saharan Africa. The workshop was a great success covering a number of key areas and reinforced positive relations with RSC.The workshop was held in conjunction with the 1st Congress of the Federation of African Societies of Chemistry (FASC; which was created in 2006 with support from the RSC). The meeting occurred on the 12th-14th September and was held at Addis Ababa University. Currently there are six societies represented (Tunisia, Egypt, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa), but in the next few years there are plans to extend membership to all African Chemical Societies. The event comprised of a scientific meeting covering topics by a speaker from each society as well as a speaker from the UK, USA and Lesotho. The focus of the meeting was analytical chemistry while also covering types of environmental problems faced by African countries. The next FASC meeting is planned for 2009 and should be hosted in Tunisia by the Tunisian Chemical Society, along with a third one planned to be hosted by the South African Society in 2011.
Also the registration is now open for ‘Antibiotics-Where Now?’ - this is a meeting which will focus on the challenges of discovering new antibiotics. It will take place in London, UK on the 21st January 2008. For more details visit the website: www.rsc.org/antibiotics08.
An international event occurring on the 9th October is the Belgium public event entitled ‘When Chemistry Meets Nature’. Dr Willy Van Brussel will give a talk describing some life saving products which have been derived from a wide range of natural products. Dr. Willy Van Brussel is corporate R&D manager of OmniChem; he has an interest in organic chemistry and natural products. For more details on this event and other events occurring in the future, why not visit the International Forthcoming events page: http://www.rsc.org/Membership/Networking/InternationalActivities/InternationalSections/InternationalEvents.asp

International publishing Snapshot

Membranes do the trick -The team, led by Paul Taylor at the University of Warwick and Andrew Livingston at Imperial College London, used a membrane to keep catalysts in environments where they work best.
www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemTech/Volume/2007/10/Membrane_trick.asp
Instant insight: Science and art in harmony Marc Aucouturier, Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, and Evelyne Darque-Ceretti, Paris School of Mines, illustrate the benefit of a multidisciplinary approach to preserving our cultural heritage. www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemTech/Volume/2007/10/Science_art_in_harmony.asp

Links and Useful Information

If you are looking for a scientific meeting then search the conference and events database: www.rsc.org/ConferencesAndEvents/conference/
Travel Grants – Deadline for applications is the 1st October: www.rsc.org/ScienceAndTechnology/AwardsAndFunding/TravelGrants/index.asp

9th International Summary (originally posted 1 May 2007)

Administrator — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:09:10 +0000

Last week in London saw the 1st UK-US Conference on Chemical and Biological Sensors and Detectors, organised by the RSC and run in collaboration with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Ministry of Defence (UK), the Home Office Scientific Development Branch (UK), US Department of Homeland Security, US Army and the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (US). Held from the 22nd-24th, most of the research presented was dominated by current threats to security, and how advances in sensor technology can help. What made this conference so unique was the combination of scientists from both the UK and US, coupled with support and delegates from the military, government and research councils based on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘The Home Office welcomed the opportunity to expose aspects of its sensor research requirements in order to develop further interest from industry and academia’ commented Dr Andrew Bell (Home Office, UK), ‘it is at meetings of this nature that cross-fertilisation can occur to potentially provide step-changes in capability’. The interdisciplinary nature of sensors, crossing the boundary between chemistry and biology was apparent throughout the conference, and was highlighted in many of the talks and posters. Crucial to the sensing technology discussed was research concentrating on sensitivity, rapidity, high throughput, low false alarm rate and concentration. In addition, the importance of the sensing device itself, and conditions ‘in the field’ was highlighted, looking at the hardware, power supply and consumption, ruggedness, logistic burden, ease of use and understanding by the end-user of the technology. Such operational issues were discussed by the final keynote speaker, Prof. Duane Lindner (Sandia National Laboratories, USA), who questioned what we should be doing with the information such devices obtain, and what information do non-technical users need to be given in order to make a highly important decisions. Running after the conference (25th April) was a closed day of workshops. These were intended to encourage participants to concentrate on how science and technology could assist in the further development of the area of chemical and biological sensor technology, based partly on the ground covered on the preceding 2 days. To encourage discussion and brainstorming, 3 parallel breakout sessions were organised with conclusions from each being presented to all participants at the end of the day. ‘It was a good natured conference, conversations between speakers and delegates buzzed between sessions’ remarked Sheila Hardwick (Home Office Scientific Development Branch). The discussions to organise a 2nd conference in this important area of research clearly shows the success of this new UK/US collaboration.

Details of conference : http://www.rsc.org/Sensors07/ ‘Common sense for sensors’ Chemistry World Comment article: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2006/August/Comment.asp

International publishing snapshot

Instant insight: nanocrystals as sensors. Rebecca Somers, Moungi Bawendi and Daniel Nocera of MIT, US, explain how to solve a paradox: making quantum dots both bright and sensitive. http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemTech/Volume/2007/05/nocera_insight.asp

Retinal repair. Polymer scaffolds cold one day be used to fix damaged eyes. http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/cb/Volume/2007/6/Retinal_repair.asp

Super solar cells. Supramolecular dyes could boost efficiency in solar cells, say scientists from the UK. http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemTech/Volume/2007/05/super_solar_cells.asp

Links and useful information

On a completely different note, the RSC launched a tough maths puzzle last week to highlight the difference in standards of maths abilities in undergraduate students from the UK and China. See details of its success and find out about the winner, David Brockley. http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2007/CompWinner.asp

Faraday Discussions 139: The Importance of Polymer Science for Biological Systems (26 – 28 March 2008), University of York, UK. Next years Faraday Discussion will focus on two major strands (i) the physical chemistry of macromolecules as common ground between biology and polymer science, and (ii) problems associated with biocompatibility and biodegradability of polymers. Call for oral presentation abstract deadline, 25 May, 2007. www.rsc.org/FD139

Looking for a scientific meeting? Search the Conference and Events database http://www.rsc.org/ConferencesAndEvents/fxsearch/