Magazine Expands Electronic Reach, Access to Archives

Employing the highest journalistic standards, C&EN kept readers abreast of news, trends, events, and activities of the chemical enterprise in 2010. One of the most significant events of 2010 was the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig and the resulting massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. C&EN’s comprehensive coverage involved science, business, and government reporters and included at least 15 stories, including the June 14, 2010, cover story.

Other noteworthy topics of coverage were: China’s rise as a scientific power (Jan. 11 and Dec. 13), five decades of laser technology (March 8), how chemistry helps paper companies develop recycled products that are easy on the environment and the skin (April 19), the much-awaited rankings of chemistry graduate schools (Oct. 25), growing cooperation between industry and academia in drug discovery (Nov. 8), and the midterm elections and their impact on science policy (Nov. 8 and 22).

C&EN also continued to closely monitor the employment situation of chemists in the aftermath of the Great Recession.  In an unprecedented collaboration, C&EN worked with ACS’s Office of Career Management & Development to link C&EN’s annual employment survey (Nov. 1) with the ACS Virtual Career Fair held in November. Editor-In-Chief Rudy Baum and Senior Editor Susan Ainsworth discussed the employment outlook during a webcast at the virtual fair and took questions from the audience.

Finally, a series of ACS Scholars profiles, which the ACS’s Office of Development collected into a 2011 calendar featuring the scholars, brought attention to this important program for supporting minority students.

Following are other major achievements in 2010:

• C&EN Archives launched on November 8, 2010, enabling users to search and access more than 500,000 pages of content back to 1923. Full text article requests in November and December 2010 totaled more than 16,000. In that period, C&EN Archives received more than 118,000 views of the first 150 words of each article.
• C&EN launched two topical news channels: the Environmental SCENE, in July, and the Analytical SCENE, in October. The channels provide tailored news streams to readers of ACS publications by highlighting important new environmental and analytical results. The channels publish stories from C&EN’s pages as well as original news reporting on studies published in ACS journals. In 2010, the two young channels provided readers with more than 100 original news articles.

• C&EN’s blog, CENtral Science, relaunched as a chemistry blog network at the end of March and is now home to eight blogs written by staff and outside contributors: Cleantech Chemistry, Just Another Electron Pusher, Newscripts, Terra Sigillata, The Chemical Notebook, The Editor’s Blog, The Haystack, and The Safety Zone. Page views for each of the blogs have increased since launch, and overall page views for CENtral Science grew from 122,500 by the end of November 2009 to more than 229,000 by the end of November 2010.
• Through ACS’s Weekly PressPac, C&EN stories appeared in online sites receiving more than 211 million unique visits per month and in publications with combined circulation of 1.5 million. Among the prominent media outlets that ran C&EN stories were the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, Yahoo News, and MSNBC.
• C&EN Online received more than 14.3 million page views, for an average of 1.2 million per month.
• C&EN Webinars hosted 12 live webcasts, with an average of 650 attendees per webcast.  The webcast on Oct. 12, 2010, about the ZACA reaction, was the first public lecture of Professor Ei-ichi Negishi after he was named one of three winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• C&EN’s Facebook page has more than 500 active users daily; it received 1,300 new “likes” in 2010 and more than 230,000 post views. Our twitter account (@cenmag) garnered more than 900 followers between its launch in March and the end of December.