News Release

ACS Mobile named best new eProduct in electronic publishing by Association of American Publishers

Grant and Award Announcement

American Chemical Society

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2011 — The American Chemical Society (ACS) has won two prestigious publishing awards for professional and scholarly excellence for its innovative mobile application, ACS Mobile.

ACS Mobile was recognized as both the "Best New eProduct in Physical Sciences and Mathematics," and "Best New eProduct/Innovation in ePublishing." The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers annually confers the highly prized PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) awards for publishing achievements across the sciences, medicine and humanities.

ACS Mobile is a first-of-its-kind mobile software application for users of Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch devices, and is optimized as a "Universal" app for the iPad tablet. The ACS' new mobile information delivery service provides scientists with an up-to-the-minute live stream of peer-reviewed research content published across the ACS's portfolio of 39 scholarly research journals, and is augmented by "Latest News" from Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN). ACS Mobile enables readers to customize their mobile experience and alerts them to new research results across several scientific disciplines, and to quickly search or browse a comprehensive database of current as well as archival scientific information.

The specialized chemistry application climbed as high as the sixth-ranked app within the iTunes Education category, and has been adopted by a global community of scientists working in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, China, and 45 additional countries around the world. Usage of the ACS Mobile app has also been growing since its launch in early 2010 –– registering more than 350,000 views of abstracts and article content from ACS Journals, and nearly 50,000 views of C&EN's Latest News stories in less than a year.

This year's recognition marks the second time that the ACS has received the distinction of a Best New eProduct PROSE award. In 2008, the Society's dynamic journal and book web delivery system, the ACS Web Editions Platform, garnered top honors for "Best New eProduct/Best Website or Platform."

"These 2010 Prose awards acknowledge the American Chemical Society's position as a trusted provider of indispensable information to chemistry professionals worldwide," said Brian Crawford, Ph.D., president of ACS Publications. "The innovative delivery technologies enabled by our digital publishing workflow have enabled us to create a new generation of products and services that maximize information discovery for our many Society members, authors, and readers around the world. ACS Mobile has quickly become an important tool for scientists who have an urgent need to stay current with the most trusted, most cited, and most read peer-reviewed research and news published by ACS, even when they find themselves outside of their office or laboratory settings."

The availability of this new ACS application comes at a time when the use of the Internet on mobile devices, including the adoption of a new wave of electronic tablet devices, is soaring. In preparation for launch of ACS Mobile, ACS Publications undertook comprehensive reader surveys and detailed analyses of mobile device usage on the Society's web delivery platform.

"From an evolving technology perspective, simply recreating the ACS Publications website for presentation on a mobile device was not a preferred approach," said John Sullivan, chief information officer for the ACS. "Rather, the IT project team joined with our publishing partners first to identify and address a specific challenge our scientist end users were facing, to craft an information technology solution tailored to a variety of mobile settings, and thus to build our development efforts around that customer-focused solution.

It was the creativity and dedication of ACS staff, including web strategy and content management experts, mobile software applications programmers, and product content specialists, that quickly brought ACS Mobile to market. We are pleased that the American Chemical Society has achieved this industry recognition as an information technology leader in scientific publishing."

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The American Chemical Society is a non-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 163,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.


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