Vol.2, No.2 (Fall 2002)

American Chemical Society Journals Now Online

One hundred percent of the content of forty-two journal titles published by the American Chemical Society is now available to the Syracuse University research community. This spring, the Syracuse University Library joined with a consortium of academic libraries to buy the access to the ACS Web Editions versions of all of the journals presently published by the ACS. In addition, the Library purchased access to all of the back issues of previously published titles through the ACS Journal Archives. Together, the acquisition of these two ACS e-journal packages gives SU users access to fourteen titles for which the Library had no previous subscription and filled in gaps in coverage of older print holdings.

The ACS Web Editions together with its Journal Archives package gives access to over 500,000 articles from more than 11,000 issues dating as far back as 1879. All articles are available in PDF format as exact facsimiles of the original printed article. According to the ACS Journal Archives website, "Developing ACS Journal Archives, containing more than 2.5 million pages of research published by ACS, was no small task. It took an investment of more than a year and $1 million for the scanning alone. Pages were scanned at 600 dpi for black and white pages and 400 dpi for pages containing color and halftone figures. These high-resolution pages form the long-term digital archive of the material. ... After scanning was completed, optical character recognition software was used to enable full- text searching of the scanned material." Plans are already underway to rescan material at higher resolution to increase the quality of the documents.

The ACS Web Editions search engine provides an easy way to locate articles. Articles can be found by citation; by author, title, or abstract; with the ability to limit results to a specific journal or set of journals, to a specific subject category, or to a date range. Searches are conducted simultaneously on both current journals and titles from the back issue archives. ACS journals can also be searched and browsed using SciFinder Scholar.

A list of the titles included in the ACS Journal Archive along with the years of availability and links to each journal's homepage follows. Also consult the chemistry full-text journal locator for a full list of electronic journals available by subscription or through full-text databases.