Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Bargain Hunting That this Journal is the best bargain in chemical publishing will come as no surprise to most of its readers. The individual subscription fee of $45 per year brings you more than 130 pages per month of the best information and ideas about chemical education available anywhere. During the academic year there is a Classroom Activity in every issue, ready to be photocopied or torn out and used immediately in your classroom. There are book and media reviews, tested demonstrations, laboratory experiments, safety information, reports from other journals, applications of information technology, and nearly two dozen feature columns edited by experienced chemical educators from colleges and high schools across North America. Our cost per printed page is among the lowest of any chemistry journal, and that’s just the beginning. Everything we publish in print is also published online, and JCE Online includes far more than just what we print. A glance at the table of contents of this issue reveals many W icons, indicating that additional useful material is available on the Web. Nearly every laboratory experiment comes with an online supplement that provides directions for students and notes for instructors that you can edit to fit local needs. There are seven feature columns available exclusively online, as well as papers with interactive components designed for publication in electronic media. Several columns that appear in print also have major online components. There is the JCE Index online, and the Project Chemlab index of laboratory experiments. There are discussion forums in which you can post your opinions on various issues and read the opinions of others. And now the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project is enabling us to provide even more online material through JCE Dlib—our digital library collection. Every year what you see printed in monthly issues is becoming more akin to the visible portion of the proverbial iceberg. The first complete volume of JCE that we published on a CD-ROM was Volume 74 in 1997. Back then only about 60 MB was required to contain our annual output. Compare that with 2001 and 2002, when approximately 250 MB of space was required to publish everything, and you can see that what you receive for your subscription dollar has increased by over a factor of four. Had the subscription price gone up in the same proportion, it would now be about $140 per year! How do we manage to make the Journal such an excellent bargain? First, editors and Boards of Publication over the years have aimed to make JCE accessible to as many teachers as possible. Therefore they have worked very hard to keep costs down and quality up. Second, we carry advertising, which provides income to supplement what we obtain from subscriptions and also brings much useful information to readers. Third, we have a dedicated, highly qualified, hard-working staff in the editorial office that goes well
beyond the call of duty to create the best possible What we really need publication. Finally, we have a broad range of are bargain builders— volunteers who contribute their time and experpeople like you who tise to keeping this Journal at the top of the are willing to work on list of quality publications and at the bottom behalf of JCE… of the list on costs. Volunteers edit columns, review manuscripts, software, and WebWare, write annotations for the Chemlab data base, bring the Journal to others through workshops and conferences, and carry out many other specific tasks that support our overall goal of providing you with the best in chemical education today. Without the hundreds of volunteers who contribute to one or more of these aspects of our organization, bringing you this Journal each month would be much more difficult—and expensive. If you are hunting for a bargain, obviously JCE is one and has been for a long time. But bargain hunters are not the appropriate species to keep us that way. What we really need are bargain builders—people like you who are willing to work on behalf of JCE to help it continue to serve all readers well. In fact we have specific needs now that you might find attractive. We are looking for people who can help test and edit Classroom Activities (see p 1253). If you are interested in chemistry with household materials—or better yet, have experience in this area—you may be just the person we want. You might contribute to the JCE Dlib in the NSDL as a volunteer editor of teaching materials based on symbolic mathematics software, specifically MATLAB and Maple—or perhaps you might contribute to JCE WebWare or to our JCE Dlib collection of quiz and exam questions. We are also looking for someone who could develop a column that reports on the latest research results and breakthroughs, based on information supplied by research institutes, universities, national laboratories, and other research centers. If you have an idea for a new column that would complement those listed in our December 2002 issue, we are always interested in such possibilities. I would be happy to hear from anyone who would like to commit to a higher level of involvement with this Journal. Just email to
[email protected] and let me know what you are thinking and how you would like to contribute. Together we can make JCE an even better bargain that it already is.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 80 No. 11 November 2003 • Journal of Chemical Education
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