Program Highlights

C&EN innovated under a new Editor-in-Chief in 2015. December marked Dr. Bibiana Campos-Seijo’s first anniversary at the helm of the Society’s news periodical. The magazine has evolved existing features (such as Global Top 50) and also experimented with new ways of storytelling, including creation of excellent editorial packages such as “Talented 12” and “Top Startups to Watch.” The former was a “talent search” for a dozen young, innovative chemists, with papers published in ACS journals. Several events at the ACS Fall National Meeting celebrated the winners, including interviews at the ACS booth. The Top Startups to Watch feature presented the stories of 10 early stage companies that are working on promising technologies across a wide range of fields in the chemical sciences.  In collaboration with the ACS Office of Public Affairs, C&EN organized a standing room only symposium at the 2015 ACS Spring National Meeting on Public Perceptions of the Chemical Enterprise. C&EN continued its emphasis on global outreach during 2015, producing a wide range of relevant content, including international coverage of business, science, policy and educational matters as well as guest editorials and opinion pieces from non-US sources. Most recently, C&EN introduced a web-based feature called ‘C&EN en Español,’ a collection of translations into Spanish of some of the more popular stories published in the magazine’s weekly issues. The initiative is part of a collaboration with Divúlgame.org.

During 2015, C&EN streamlined and simplified many of its internal publishing processes, while striving to ensure that content and all publishing formats (print, online, mobile) remain of the highest quality and are fresh and attractive to readers and advertisers. In Spring 2015, C&EN launched a new weekly curated e-newsletter that is delivered to the full ACS membership, and that is supported by advertising sponsors.

C&EN won Folio’s prestigious 2015 Eddie and Ozzie awards for When Chemicals Became Weapons of War by Sarah Everts and for the magazine’s video product Speaking of Chemistry. The Eddie and Ozzie annual awards honor the best design and editorial products in the magazine and publishing industry.

C&EN continued to provide valuable scientific and new technology information to ACS members and the broader scientific community in 2015, including 44 sponsored webinars on a broad range of technology topics. In September 2015, C&EN convened a one-day virtual symposium on Advances in Drug Discovery and Development, attracting a global audience of some 7,000 pre-registered viewers.