I’m sure all you dilligent up-to-the-minute literature-lovers out there have just received your Journal of the American Society table of contents alert for issue 21. I trust you noticed the little ad for ‘JACS-β’ and the editorial…
JACS has launched a beta website, which includes a ‘virtual thematic web issue’ (on total synthesis), downloadable PowerPoint slides of all the figures/schemes of an article and (gulp) “Listen to the complete text of selected JACS communications.” For real.
Personally, my favourite part is the ‘What kind of smartphone do you use?’ type of questionnaire along the RHS. Facebook-tastic!
A bit more seriously, it’s good to see JACS getting a bit 2.0 (or indeed 21st century) on us – everyone likes a theme issue now and then (although web-only means you don’t get a nice hard copy to refer to endlessly), and I bet a lot of lecturers will like the PowerPoint slides, but…podcasts of full-on research articles? I haven’t listened to one yet, but might save one for the commute soon – anyone else tuned in and care to let us know what they think?
Neil
Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)
The V2.0 is great! Especially the thematic web issues. The powerpoint slides needs some improvement (in terms of graphic), but the idea is fine and I find it quite useful. Now, the podcast is cool. Wonder if there will be a JOC-beta?
I don’t know if this made the rounds a while ago, but have you ever heard of “pubcasting”?
Check out Scivee.tv- you can see researchers present video detailing recent publications. I think it’s an awesome concept for everyone involved, though there doesn’t seem to be a lot of chemistry yet, just physics and biology.