FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | March 28, 2011

Award-Winning ACS Mobile App Now Available on Android Tablets and Phones

WASHINGTON, March 28, 2011 — The American Chemical Society (ACS) today announced the expansion of its award-winning mobile application, ACS Mobile, to tablet and smartphone devices with Google’s AndroidTM operating system.

Launched initially in 2010 for Apple iOS devices, including an optimized version for the iPad tablet, ACS Mobile allows scientists to keep current with a live, multi-journal stream of new peer-reviewed research content (Articles ASAPSM) published across the Society's preeminent portfolio of 39 scholarly research journals, including the flagship Journal of the American Chemical Society. The app is augmented by “Latest News” from Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) –– the Society’s industry-leading magazine and preferred source of online news for its more than 163,000-member professionals.

Along with numerous positive user reviews and testimonials, ACS Mobile recently received the highly prized PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) award for both the “Best New eProduct in Physical Sciences and Mathematics,” and “Best New eProduct/Innovation in ePublishing” from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.

ACS Mobile has proven to be an essential tool that aligns with our mission to be a provider of indispensable information to chemistry professionals worldwide,” said Brian Crawford, Ph.D., president of ACS Publications. “I’m proud of the continued collaboration between the ACS Publications Division and our Society’s IT experts in expanding ACS Mobile to an even wider global audience of our authors, reviewers, editors, customers and readers. As more of our users begin to utilize their smartphone and tablet devices for browsing content, ACS Publications intends to lead the way in delivering high-quality, high-impact peer-reviewed content in a dynamic, customized format.”

Android-powered smartphones are propelling much of the growth in the smartphone market; a February 2011 report by Gartner ranks Android phones second in worldwide sales with 22.7 percent of the market.

“When we launched ACS Mobile for iPhone one year ago, we were responding to the majority of our mobile users, who were at the time utilizing Apple devices to access the ACS Web Editions Platform,” said Brandon Nordin, vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Web Strategy for ACS Publications. “Since that time, our Web Editions Platform has experienced a fourfold growth in usage from mobile devices, with a significant portion attributable to AndroidTM devices. The decision to build an AndroidTM version of the app is guided both by user behavior and feedback, as well as by the innovations ACS seeks to make as we enter the expanding mobile marketplace for scientific and technical information.”

ACS Mobile offers the following unique features:

  • Up-to-the minute access to ACS ASAP ArticlesSM published online, personalized from across the entire portfolio of 39 peer-reviewed ACS Journals.
  • Tailored “on the fly” filtering options for viewing content from selected ACS titles.
  • Dynamic delivery of an indexed list of more than 37,000 ACS research articles published annually, and easy pathways for free reader access to the graphical and text abstracts of those articles.
  • A “Latest News” feed from &EN Online.
  • Saving of favorites within the application in a “My ASAPs” folder for convenient offline reading.
  • Interface to full-text article access and display (via wireless or Virtual Private Networks) for authorized users at institutions that license ACS Journals content.
  • Quick Search of over 1 million original scientific research articles, book chapters, and new stories now hosted on the ACS Web Editions Platform — discoverable by author, keyword, title, abstract, DOI or bibliographic citation.
  • Sharing of links and snippets to alert friends and colleagues to new ACS ASAP ArticlesSM via e-mail and social networking sites.

“As reading and browsing increasingly take place while are on the go, we at ACS realize it is important to deliver an experience optimized for display and use on a range of mobile devices,” said John Sullivan, chief information officer at ACS. “Applications provide a rich experience with increasingly robust functionality that is not so readily achieved via a traditional web browser when using small devices. “Increasingly users are turning to applications to discover information. Just this month The New York Times reported on a study that noted 50 percent of mobile data usage originates from native applications. ACS Mobile was extended to Android with these considerations in mind. As the tablet market continues its rapid expansion, development teams at ACS are exploring new ways for readers to follow, read, and interact with the high quality information that is published by our Society for the benefit of chemists worldwide.”

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Michael Bernstein
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