The Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) has flirted with web 2.0 with it’s recent JACS β initiative. It has been warmly received around the blogosphere [CSB, TCB, CBC]. Although, I don’t have any complaints about the website, what I really wanted was less hand-holding and more of a shotgun approach to navigating through JACS online.

The nicest thing about thumbing through the print edition of JACS, is reading all the various chemistry that is outside your research tunnel-vision but still interesting.  If you go to the JACS homepage, here, you’ll see a list of 20 of the most recent articles, but not all of them! For example, 31 papers were added to ASAP today and only the last 20 are shown on their website, hardly a dire circumstance, but the fact is you miss some by using that setup. JACS also offers a nifty RSS feed of their articles, but I’ve never come across an RSS reader that’ll nicely format an active feed, 30+ submissions a day, in a format that will ever make me want to read it.

So how does one go about designing a more attractive JACS online browsing environment? Below is my attempt, it is as busy and attractive as a conference poster, but it lets you see a huge list of the most recently added papers to JACS ASAP.

The website parses through the JACS RSS feed. I was a bit worried about incorporating the graphical abstracts, but since they are included in the RSS feed, I’m going to claim fair use. The site isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done.

Here is a link for your viewing pleasure, Full Frontal JACS: http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Comments are always welcomed, but obviously this format is not for everyone.

Edit: A link to the site has been included in the links section to the right, towards the bottom under websites, titled Full Frontal JACS.

Update 1: Improved ACIE RSS feed

Update 2: Links edited to point to ChemFeeds instead of the simple script.

Mitch