Chemical Societies on the Web

What do you expect your society to dofor you after you have paid your fee?There are obvious services such asmembership journals and meetings, butalso pushing forward the chemical inter-ests of the members. Numerous othersare conceivable. Nowadays, a chemicalsociety�s web site (Table 1) should have aprofessional and representative appear-ence.

You would like to find informationabout what services the society offers.All of the sites investigated in this reviewoffer information on their activities butnot all of them seem to want you tojoinÐonly slightly more than half ofthem offer an application form fordownload or information on who tocontact directly.

Many chemical societies have divi-sions, sections or discussion groups,

which are often presenton the society�s web site,so you can find outwhether you can pushforward your specialityin that society. For in-stance, does your societyhave a polymer chemistrygroup and who do youneed to contact to join?

Publications are an es-sential service and alsohelp societies make mon-ey to fund other activities,but they are not linkedfrom all of the sites ofsocieties that are not pub-lishers themselves. Partner societies arelinked from Wiley-VCH�s journal webpages to demonstrate their importancefor these publications. The AmericanChemical Society and the Royal Societyof Chemistry (UK) display their varietyof products.

The web is ideal to gather informationin event calendars, where organisers cansubmit their conference announcements.Almost all societies use this possibility toserve their members. Registration forthe GDCh�s general meeting is mostlyweb-based.

Job offers are only found on a smallnumber of society pages, such as theGDCh and the RSC, which also provideadvice for career planning, interviewtechniques and so on. The offers areprimarily targeted to the society�s homecountry, so it is a good place to startlooking for a job abroad. Also have a

look at the Younger Chemists� pagessome societies offer.

What else can you find on chemicalsocieties� web pages? The GermanChemical Society (GDCh) has set up atrade fair (ªHelpScienceº) for usedbooks, journals, and instruments. TheFrench SFC has a discussion boardcurrently devoted to recycling issues(registration required). The Bunsen-Ge-sellschaft (Germany) has one as well, butit is empty. On the web site of the ACS,news appears on the entry page and youcan also participate in weekly quickpolls, mostly on science and educationpolitics. The RSC is the only one thatbothers you with a small extra (search)window that opens automatically whenyou access their site. The Italian site is ascolorful as you would expect from thissunny country.

You can expect a lot from yourchemical society web site and someactually offer a large variety of informa-tion. Most of them focus on their owncountry, so less than half of them have anEnglish page to facilitate internationalcooperation. Even the big fish in thepond such as the German and the Frenchdo not. Maybe there is something youcan do for your society by volunteeringnot just your ideas but also your designor programming talent for their webmaintenance team!

Mario MüllerWiley-VCH, Weinheim (Germany)

WEB SITES

Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2001, 40, No. 17 � WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH, D-69451 Weinheim, 2001 1433-7851/01/4017-3261 $ 17.50+.50/0 3261

Table 1. Society sites reviewed

Country Society Web Site

Austria GÖCh http://goech.at/Belgium SRC http://www.ulb.ac.be/assoc/src/

KVCV http://www.kvcv.be/Czech Republic CSCH http://www.csch.cz/France SFC http://www.sfc.fr/Germany GDCh http://www.gdch.de/

Bunsen Society http://www.bunsen.de/Great Britain RSC http://www.rsc.org/Greece EEX http://www.eex.gr/Hungary MKE http://www.mtesz.hu/gtagegy/mke/Italy SCI http://www.sci.uniba.it/Japan http://www.chemistry.or.jp/index-e.htmlPoland PTC http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/Portugal SPQ http://www.spq.pt/Russia Mendeleev http://www.chemsoc.org/networks/enc/fecs/fecsrussia.htmSpain RSEQ http://www.ucm.es/info/rsequim/Sweden SK http://www.chemsoc.se/Switzerland SCS/SCG/SSC http://www.swiss-chem-soc.ch/The Netherlands KNCV http://www.kncv.nl/indexkncv.htmlUSA ACS http://www.chemistry.org/

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