Chemistry

The Libraries have converted our subscription to the ACS Symposium Series from print volumes to e-books, and have also purchased all back e-book volumes to 1974, when the series began.  Find volumes in this series in the Library Catalog, or via the ACS Books platform.

[5/15/23]

The chemistry circulating book and reference collections, formerly located in the Mallet Library and more recently housed on the 6th floor of the Perry Castañeda Library (PCL), have been moved to temporary storage in the Collections Deposit Library (CDL), a closed-stack facility.  Use our Pick It Up service in the Library Catalog to place a request for any circulating book, which we will deliver to a library service desk of your choice. 

The Chemistry Collection will eventually be moved to a new permanent location, yet to be determined.  Most hard-copy journals were transferred to remote storage in 2017. 

[Updated 1/9/23; 11/15/22]

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced that it is moving toward making its entire portfolio of fully-owned journals Open Access within five years.  This is driven by compliance with Plan S, an initiative across a group of largely European funding agencies that mandates that all articles resulting from that funding be published in fully open journals.  The transition at RSC will affect its hybrid subscription journals - the bulk of its portfolio - which accept author fees to make individual articles open at time of publication.  Read the press release

[11/1/22]

Effective with applications after January 25, 2023, the NIH will require researchers to submit data management plans (DMPs) with their grant applications, and eventually to openly share all "scientific data" generated in their projects.  The impetus for this mandate is the reproducibility crisis in life science research - one study has found that less than half of published studies can be reproduced.  Some scientists are concerned about the added administrative burdens and costs placed on underfunded and understaffed labs and programs.   Read more in Nature. 

[2/17/22, rev. 9/30/22]

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a revision that recommends that by 2026 all federally funded research results are to be made public "without delay" in agency-designated repositories, eliminating the optional 12-month embargo established by the original memorandum in 2013.  Another significant change is that all federal granting agencies are covered by this policy, while the previous guidance covered only those agencies awarding in excess of $100M annually.  The memorandum also requires simultaneous sharing of research data at the time of peer-reviewed publication.  Read the White House press release here and coverage in Science.

[8/26/22; revised 10/28/22]

The nascent Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has announced that Rice University's OpenStax, a major nonprofit platform for free course materials for students and instructors, has acquired the rights to the new 10th edition of John McMurry's best-selling textbook, Organic Chemistry.  It's rare for the top echelon of textbook authors, who earn considerable royalties from the traditional publishing business, to embrace OER.  McMurry says he's doing it in memory of his son Peter, who died of cystic fibrosis, and will donate his license fee to research into that disease.  The full book should be available in OpenStax in the fall of 2023.

[updated 5/3/23; 8/11/22]