American Chemical Society

The American Chemical Society (ACS), a learned society (professional association) based in the United States, supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876, the ACS currently has over 158,000 members at all degree-levels and in all fields of chemistry, chemical engineering and related fields. The ACS holds national meetings twice a year covering the complete field of chemistry, plus dozens of smaller conferences in specific fields. Its publications division produces some two dozen first-rate scholarly journals (the oldest of them, Journal of the American Chemical Society, has appeared since 1879) and several book series. The newest journal, ACS Chemical Biology, has unique web-only features such as "Ask the Expert" and a WIKI and ChemBioGlossary open to all scientists. The ACS gets income from the Chemical Abstracts Service as a primary source.

The American Chemical Society also sponsors the United States National Chemistry Olympiad (USNCO), a contest used to select the four-member team that represents the United States at the International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO).

The ACS Division of Chemical Education provides standardized tests for various subfields of chemistry. The two most commonly-used tests are the undergraduate-level tests for general and organic chemistry. Each of these tests consists of 70 multiple-choice questions, and gives students exactly two hours to complete the exam.

The ACS annual meeting for 2006 will take place in San Francisco, September 10th through the 14th.

PubChem controversy

Since the inception of National Center for Biotechnology Information's open access PubChem chemical compound database initiative, ACS has actively lobbied NCBI and its supervising agencies to stop the database development effort. ACS markets its own subscription- and pay-based Chemical Abstracts Service. In a May 23, 2005, press-release, the ACS stated:

The ACS believes strongly that the Federal Government should not seek to become a taxpayer supported publisher. By collecting, organizing, and disseminating small molecule information whose creation it has not funded and which duplicates CAS services, NIH has started ominously, down the path to unfettered scientific publishing...

See also:

• ACS style - the ACS citation standard.

External links

• ACS website
• ACS Publications website
• ACS Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS)
• A Cauldron Bubbles: PubChem and the American Chemical Society (Information Today, June 2005)
• ACS Chemical Biology WIKI