The American Chemical Society has taken another aggressive step into the world of electronic information services with the introduction of ChemCenter - a "bookmark" site on the World Wide Web for information about the chemical sciences - at the society's fall national meeting.
"We think it's going to be the one great place to find material about chemistry," ACS President Ronald Breslow said in announcing ChemCenter.
Breslow says the new service pulls together existing ACS information on the web with an array of new services for chemists, other scientists, and the general public. ChemCenter rapidly became a topic of conversation among meeting attendees - including ChemCenter competitors - who stood in line at the ACS exposition booth for on-line demonstrations.
ChemCenter is a premiere on-line service "because it is available now and because it contains the most in-depth information of any Internet service for chemists today from the most trusted name in chemistry-related sciences," says Director of ACS Special Publishing Operations Anthony Durniak.
About three-fourths of ACS members are regular Internet users, Durniak says. "The scientific community developed the Internet," he says. "It's no surprise that our [ACS] members are among the most active users."
ChemCenter - located on the Internet at http://www.ChemCenter.org - combines information already available from the ACS home page on the web with new access to ACS journals and magazines; databases from ACS's Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) in Columbus, Ohio; and a host of other on-line services geared to serve students, educators, industry professionals, and just about anyone else with a need for information about chemistry or the chemical world.
"There is growing competition among providers of electronic scientific information," says Robert Swann, director of technology at CAS, citing another reason for development of ChemCenter. For now, he says, ChemCenter is free of charge to all web-site visitors except for access to those areas that already require society membership or other payment. The ACS Job Bank, for example, can be accessed through ChemCenter, but its use is limited to society members.
From the ChemCenter home page, a user can click on topic areas that make up the new service. Under "electronic publications," for example, three publications - the Journal of Physical Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Environmental Science & Technology - are posted on-line in an interactive format. Access to these publications is free, at least until January 1997. Readers can view the table of contents for these publications as well as all full-text articles in the most current issues. Interactivity means that readers can click on footnotes to view citations while reading text, for example, and they can look at chemical structures or other illustrations that accompany journal or magazine articles.
Under "conferences and communications," ChemCenter site visitors can retrieve information about the programs of ACS national, regional, and other meetings - including registration forms - as well as find links to other scientific meetings. "Professional services" contains the ACS Job Bank, ACS policy statements, and Industry Relations services; and the "education" category contains information on ACS elementary and high school programs, continuing education courses, and electronic courses.
The "database searching" area of ChemCenter offers some of the most valuable services available to chemists, explains Andy Hanks, ACS director of information services. Chemists can go to ChemCenter to search the CAS Chemical Patents Plus directory, for example, and they can access STN, an international network of nearly 200 on-line databases.
Soon, Hanks says, ChemCenter will include such features as chat rooms and moderated discussion groups, the ACS Directory of Graduate Research, the annual LabGuide directory that accompanies the journal Analytical Chemistry, and the chemistry reference Chemcyclopedia. Document delivery and other services are also planned.
The ChemCenter web site, Durniak says, "positions ACS to have a financially viable way to provide Internet services, with ChemCenter revenue coming from advertising sales, sales of subscriptions, and on-line sales of products and services."
In addition to advertising space within ChemCenter, companies might also pay fees for services such as home-page links embedded within LabGuideor other ACS publications, says Hanks. Links for chemical suppliers or scientific instrument companies, for instance, could allow users to directly purchase products and services from them on-line. In the same way, ACS could market its products and services, which could be ordered and charged to credit card numbers stored in secure areas of user or member profiles.
ChemCenter competitors had their own announcements and service demonstrations readily visible at the ACS meeting. Two immediate competitors are ChemWeb - scheduled to go on-line in September in a joint venture of MDL Information Systems in San Leandro, Calif., and Current Science Group, based in London - and Science Direct from Elsevier Science. Both on-line systems will provide many services similar to those now available on ChemCenter.
The ACS edge, according to Durniak and others, is ChemCenter's rich content provided by ACS. The new service represents an investment of more than $2 million - and growing - for a variety of electronic products and services developed for the chemical community over the past two and a half years. Pulled together as ChemCenter, Durniak says, "it is information that we think is substantive and already available.
"Every scientific publisher and society is trying to determine if the Internet is an opportunity or a threat," he continues. "The team at ACS felt that, by moving aggressively, we can turn the Internet into an opportunity for the whole society."
William Schultz
ACS Home Page