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Publishing

Putting readers first

by Bibiana Campos Seijo
July 22, 2018 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 96, Issue 30

 

At C&EN one of our main goals—the most important one—is to establish as deep an engagement as possible with our readers. At the core of our readership are the 150,000-plus members of the American Chemical Society, who have unlimited access to all the content we produce. But our audience extends way beyond that, and the team here will often hear me refer to “potential members”—that is, readers who are not members of ACS ... yet!

My philosophy is that a large proportion of the individuals who consume our content (the part that we make freely available on our website) have the potential to become ACS members.

Within this group of potential members (we are talking possibly millions, going by our website usage data), three very large audiences are important for C&EN to nurture for a number of reasons:

International readers. Science has no borders, and ACS continues to invest in growing its global reach and influence.

Early-career scientist readers. They are the future of our profession.

Industry readers. This group has shown declining engagement for a number of years.

With this in mind, we are taking conscious steps to ensure we develop content that appeals to these constituencies. For example, we are currently working on a feature that will focus on the graduate school experience. The feature will include essays from students, so you’ll have the opportunity to read firsthand accounts of what the experience is like in today’s world. Watch for it in the Sept. 10 issue.

In addition, I’d like to highlight a number of activities so you have an idea of areas where we are investing our efforts.

The first one is an award we launched this week to celebrate Brazilian women in the chemical sciences. This award (sponsored by C&EN and CAS, a division of ACS) will culminate in a series of talks by the winners at an event on Sept. 11 at São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) headquarters. Three winners will each receive $2,000, a certificate, three years of free ACS membership, and a SciFinder ID valid for three years. If you know someone who you think deserves this accolade, please do not hesitate to nominate them.

On the other side of the world, Shanghai­Tech University will host a photography exhibition featuring C&EN’s Chemistry in Pictures images. The university will be showing about 80 images in its library for eight weeks starting July 29. This date was selected to coincide with the opening of the ACS Publications Symposium that will take place at that institution.

And right after the ACS national meeting, C&EN will be attending EuCheMS 2018 in Liverpool, England, on Aug. 26–30, where we will be sponsoring a session aimed at early-career chemists, aptly named “Future Leaders.” I’ll be doing a presentation about C&EN’s Talented 12 program (with a view to increase the proportion of non-U.S. nominations) and will act as a moderator of the event. C&EN will also be featured in a science communication panel later in the week.

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In addition, we continue to translate a growing number of our stories into Spanish and Chinese. Besides making this content available on our website, we are also promoting the Chinese pieces via the social media network WeChat and several monthly newsletters that ACS publishes in China.

We promote the Spanish pieces through partnerships with Spanish-language organizations involved in the dissemination of scientific information, such as Divúlgame.org and OpenMind, as well as via the newsletter “CAS Hispanoamérica.”

And we have so much more in the pipeline. At C&EN, we will continue to put our readers—ACS members and potential members—first.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.

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