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.