The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced the launch of ACS ChemWorx, a new research collaboration system designed to integrate all facets of the researcher's work life. Every step of the research process - from forming an initial concept, to exchanging documents and literature references with a network of global collaborators, to assembling the resulting research findings with coauthors - can now be performed within the secure and interoperable ACS ChemWorx environment.
The ACS also has announced its strategic investment in colwiz, Ltd. (colwiz), an early-stage company established by Oxford University scientists that is providing much of the underlying technology for ACS ChemWorx. Under the terms of the development agreement, ACS and colwiz will combine the Society's trusted information services and membership benefits for chemistry professionals with the power of cloud-based social collaboration technology developed by colwiz, Ltd.
ACS ChemWorx enables researchers to quickly create online profiles with comprehensive messaging and social communication features, and to organize secure workgroups and projects, share document libraries, manage calendars and group task lists, and maintain private discussion areas. Integrated Web, desktop, and mobile applications provide powerful capabilities for content discovery, reference and document management, coordinated storage and retrieval of data, and collaborative manuscript preparation and editing, as well as personal publication tracking with ACS Publications. ACS ChemWorx is being offered free to any ACS-registered user, and to faculty and students based at any of the Society's institutional customers worldwide.
Coinciding with the launch of ACS ChemWorx, ACS Publications is also introducing notable feature enhancements to the digital editions of its entire portfolio of peer reviewed research journals. These include ACS ActiveView PDF and Add to ACS ChemWorx.
ACS ActiveView PDF is an interactive full text format that enables researchers to attach highlights and notes to ACS journal articles of interest, explore referenced abstracts via the CAS SciFinder-powered Reference QuickView, make and save annotations in their ACS ChemWorx library, share links with colleagues and lab group members, and sync their libraries across smartphone, tablet, and desktop environments.
With the Add to ACS ChemWorx feature, researchers can export citations from any ACS article to their ACS ChemWorx reference libraries through a single click via links found on search results, and on table of contents, abstract, and full text page types.
