All,
Two editorials I wanted to make you aware of and one award...
Marta and Rachel have been wrangling some of us into the new Safety Network (https://www.acs.org/about/governance/committees/chemical-safety/acs-safety-network.html)
and one of the first outputs from it is this editorial, Chemical Safety Ecosystem
of the American Chemical Society: A Primer (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chas.5c00201).
I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I did collaborating on it. Personally, I never fully understood the differences between CCS and DCHAS before this effort and I enjoyed learning about the history of DCHAS.
The other editorial I want to point out is the announcement that ACS converted ACS Chemical Health & Safety to a diamond access journal, meaning
that ACS
CHAS is free to publish open access in and free to read,
with all editorial and publishing costs being covered by the American Chemical Society, American
Chemical Society (ACS), Leader in Chemistry, Leader in Safety: Most Trusted. Most Cited. Most Read... Most Accessible (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chas.5c00226).
One of the notes we make in the editorial is the top ten most accessed articles this year, of which at least 6 are authored by DCHAS folks (this is just based on my own name recognition, so there could be more):
1. The
Piper Alpha Disaster: A Personal Perspective with Transferrable Lessons on the Long-Term Moral Impact of Safety Failures
2. Education
and Collaboration to Manage the Risks of High Energy Materials in Research and Development
3. Beyond
the Visual: Achieving Accessibility in Scientific Figures (DCHAS author(s))
4. Challenges
of Legacy Chemicals (2025) (DCHAS author(s))
5. A
Safety Guidance Document for Lithium Aluminum Hydride (LAH) Reduction: A Resource for Developing Specific SOPs on LAH Manipulations (DCHAS
author(s))
6. Lessons
Learned─Explosion and Fires Resulting from Quenching Lithium, Lithium Nitride, and Sodium (DCHAS author(s))
7. Practical
Guidelines for the Safe Use of Fluorine Gas Employing Continuous Flow Technology
8. How
to Review a Paper
9. Lessons
Learned from a Short-Term Exposure to DMF (DCHAS author(s))
10. Safety
Piranhas: A Review of Methods and Protocols (DCHAS author(s))
To all of you who publish in and read the journal, thank you. This year at the ACS’ EIC conference, I accepted the
2026 ACS Publications Journal Influence Award,
Submissions Award
in the category of “Established journals (more than five years) with 100–999 annual submissions”
for increasing by more than 55% the submissions to ACS Chemical Health & Safety on behalf of
the journal. DCHAS was instrumental to making safety a core value at ACS, which is what brought the journal back to ACS Publication (go read the primer!). This award is one piece of evidence that all your hard work
has impact.
Sincerely,
Mary Beth