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
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.
