ACS on Campus Event at NJIT on December 5

An event is planned for several months and in the blink of an eye, it is over.  For several months I worked on this event with Jennifer Taylor Howell of the American Chemical Society to plan the ACS on Campus event that was held on Wednesday December 5.  From 10 AM until 12 noon we worked on preparing the room the meeting.

Reg Tomkins of the NJIT chemical engineering department spoke about the benefits of being a member of the Society.  He has been active in the ACS for many years and is certainly the most qualified to talk on this effort.  Reg described the mission, values and strategic goals of ACS.  The brief talk concluded with a statement of the goals and objectives of the ACS on Campus event.

Donald Sebastian, the Senior Vice President for Research and Development welcomed everyone on behalf of NJIT.  He spoke on how important chemistry and chemical engineering is in solving global problems.

The first module of the day considered scientific publishing.  Jaan Pesti, the editor of Organic Process Research and Development (OPRD), discussed how to get started in publishing.  Scientists conduct experiments, maintain laboratory notebooks, and then want to publish to making their findings accessible to all.  Some of the points he made were:

• Scientific publications must create new knowledge
• There are several steps involved in writing a manuscript
• A cover letter should be sent when submitting a manuscript
• The Peer review process
• Common mistakes that authors make when responding to editors

The next talk on publishing ethics was given by Jitesh Soares who is the Managing Editor of ACS Chemical Biology and  ACS Chemical Neuroscience.  Some of the areas of discussion were:

• Most copyright violations are unintentional.
• Plagiarizing
• Self-plagiarizing
• Re-publishing an article
• Cutting and pasting from one document to another
• Hedging – submitting a manuscript to multiple journals simultaneously
• Ghost authorship – including as an author an individual who did not contribute to the research.
• The retraction rate of articles in ACS journals is less than 0.05%

There are two web sites of interest:

1. Ethics http://pubs.acs.org/ethics
2. Resource Center for authors http://pubs.acs.org/4authors

The second module in the program was given by Daniel Reasoner who talked about 45 minutes on the basics of searching Scifinder Scholar.  In such a short time frame it was impossible to describe the many facets of the database in any detail.  He described the many commands and capabilities of this very powerful tool in finding chemical information.  He offered to return to NJIT to give more in depth training.

The final module was given by Joe Martino who is a career consultant to the American Chemical Society.  In my opinion this was the most important part of the program since most of the participants were graduate students who will soon seek their first professional position.  There are 5 areas where a new graduate can seek employment:

1. Research and Development
2. Product Development
3. Manufacturing and Supply Chain
4. Quality Control and Regulatory
5. Sales and Marketing
6. Of course different jobs within these areas have different specifications.

Most of his talk was devoted to resume writing.  He discussed the difference between a resume and curriculum vitae.  He strongly emphasized that every resume be written with great care since even a very small error can result in a candidate being eliminated.  A hiring manager will often decide within 30 seconds to accept or reject an application for further consideration.  He presentation was very interactive as he succeeding in creating a dialog with the students.

There were 63 attendees that included students, library staff and faculty.  It certainly was a very successful event.