Chemical Education Today
News from Journal House New Features We welcome a new column in this issue, with the first contribution from the ACS Committee on Professional Training. Jerry Mohrig from Carleton College is the current chair of that important committee, and he will bring you periodic reports of what the committee is doing. He may also ask for reader feedback to the committee occasionally. There are two late-breaking reports in the Chemical Education Today section, both of which were received just days before our press deadlines. One is the report from the Division of Chemical Education’s programs at the Las Vegas ACS Meeting compiled by Tom Wildeman, who chairs the Division’s Program Committee. Despite the conflict with the beginning of the fall semester, there was a strong CHED program. The other report is that of the designation of a National Historic Chemical Landmark at Oberlin College, to commemorate Charles Martin Hall’s discovery of the electrochemical process to extract aluminum from its ore. The report is written by Norman Craig, who has written on Hall in this Journal and elsewhere.
The Journal Celebrates! This is the November issue, or more correctly Volume 74, Number 11, so Volume 75 and the celebrations that will go with it are just around the corner. We will celebrate in print, with symposia, with poster sessions, with a birthday party and cake, with a gala mixer… We will look back but we will also look forward to see how the Journal might be delivered in the future. (See Online is the Word of the Meeting!, below.) During the Las Vegas ACS Meeting the Journal’s Board of Publication and its editorial staff met with the Division’s Program Committee to coordinate plans for the celebrations at the 15th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (August 9–13, 1998, at the University of Waterloo) and at the Fall ACS Meeting in Boston (August 23–28, 1998). At the 15th BCCE there will be two symposia—“75 Great Years of the Journal of Chemical Education” and “The Journal of Chemical Education: What’s in It for You?”—as well as a party for everyone complete with a special birthday cake on Tuesday evening. We plan to have as many as possible of our editorial staff on hand. At the Boston ACS Meeting our celebrations will lead off with a gala Sunday evening mixer and poster session. On Monday morning the symposium “Remembering the Past”, organized by Doris Kolb, will bring together all living editors of the Journal as well as a number of other people who have played a part in its life. For the afternoon, Jerry Bell is organizing “Looking Forward to the Future”, during which we will look at the future of our science as well as the future of publishing in general. In our printed pages—and in JCE Online ✚ —we will celebrate by bringing our subscribers the Viewpoints! series. This is a very special series of papers by experts in their field; in their papers they will delineate the past and future of our science.
Return from Las Vegas We have returned and have now nearly unpacked from taking JCE on the road, this time to the ACS Meeting in Las Vegas. We talked with lots of people and listened to even more—teachers, students, advertisers, industrial chemists,
other publishers, …. People told us that they really like our use of color, the new arrangement of articles into sections, the gathering together of articles around a specific topic. (Those of you interested in environmental chemistry will find a nice collection next month in the December issue.) We showed off both of our new Classroom Activity inserts, and again approval was very strong. The result? Classroom Activity #3 is in this issue. Its title is How Big Is the Balloon? Stoichiometry Using Baking Soda and Vinegar. We have planned that this will arrive at just about the right time to use in your classes. While it is fine for us to go to meetings and interact with people there, we also want to have input from readers who do not go to meetings. If that is you and you have advice or praise or suggestions for the Journal staff, send them along. Tell us what you think. Our masthead (page 1252 of this issue) always tells you how to reach us.
Online is the Word of the Meeting! While there is never a theme of an ACS Meeting, there was in Las Vegas a very obvious buzzword: online! It seems as if every journal is adding this option, right away. And this Journal is no exception. We have been increasing the content of JCE Online during the last year, with the goal of having everything from the print version plus having that in PDF format plus the supplementary materials plus the abstracts of all articles plus the complete index plus all of JCE Internet plus all JCE Internet articles in open review plus all of the JCE Software information plus…. We have named this, rather obviously, JCE Online ✚. You can preview JCE Online ✚ during the months of November and December. Both the November issue and the December issue will be available free, to everyone, so that you can get acquainted with it. Paid subscriptions will begin in January 1998. You will find more information on pages 1272 and 1273.
Be a Journal Ambassador You can be a Journal ambassador. If you are organizing a workshop, seminar, inservice program, or a course to help prepare teachers, we can help. Just let us know and we will be happy to send you copies of JCE, our JCE Publications/ Software Catalog, and other materials. We have printed extra copies of our popular Classroom Activity series and can send you spare copies while supplies last. We have set up a special calendar just for our Ambassadors. Let us know how we can help you spread the word about the Journal.
Special Email Access for Reviewers and Authors The Journal audience is really into technology. When we provided email access, we expected it to be used. But we did not expect an avalanche! Actually, this is just what we wanted to happen, and to help with the sorting of incoming messages, we have added two special email accounts:
[email protected], for those returning reviews of manuscripts
[email protected], for authors who have minimal or no changes to the proofs of their articles These new addresses are in place now. Please use them.
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Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 74 No. 11 November 1997
