From this week's C&EN, an interesting comment from H.C. Chen, chair of the International Activities Committee and Wayne E. Jones, Jr., the chair of the Membership Affairs Committee:
The American Chemical Society has a long history and unsurpassed reputation as the premier publisher of chemistry-related research. Increasingly, the majority of the papers contributed to its world-class journals are from non-U.S. colleagues. This is not a prediction of the future but is the current reality of our society and our profession.
Both the ACS constitution and mission statement promote international engagement, and the society has embraced this opportunity in ways that extend well beyond publishing.
For example, last year, one in five new ACS members lived outside the U.S., and more than 15% of the entire membership lived in countries other than the U.S.
Consistently, 15% of national meeting attendees are international....I wonder what the citizenship numbers looked like for the membership of the ACS 20 years ago?
Hardly surprising. The ACS has made hard pushes to encourage internationals to get involved with the organization. They even setup a separate ACS page in Chinese.
ReplyDeletethe society has embraced this opportunity in ways that extend well beyond publishing.
In other words, you've managed to sucker foreigners into paying dues since Americans aren't any more.
What sense does it make to encourage international membership when the jobs for citizens are sparse and practically nil for non-citizens? All this does is put money back in the pockets of ACS execs.
amen.
ReplyDelete