The Organ­ic Reac­tions Catal­y­sis Soci­ety announces its Call for Papers in advance of the 23rd ORCS Con­fer­ence March 14–18, 2010 in Mon­terey, CA. The abstract sub­mis­sion dead­line is Sept 8, 2009 and details can be found at www​.orcs​.org. Addi­tion­al­ly, the Soci­ety announces an agree­ment with Springer Pub­lish­ing to pub­lish the pro­ceed­ings of the 23rd Con­fer­ence in the jour­nal, Top­ics in Catal­y­sis. ORCS has a long tra­di­tion of pub­lish­ing its pro­ceed­ings in book for­mat as a ser­vice to the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. Recent sur­veys of ORCS mem­ber­ship revealed a desire for greater vis­i­bil­i­ty and elec­tron­ic acces­si­bil­i­ty of the ORCS pro­ceed­ings. In response, ORCS has forged the agree­ment with Top­ics in Catal­y­sis for pub­li­ca­tion of the pro­ceed­ings, index­ing by major abstract ser­vices, elec­tron­ic acces­si­bil­i­ty of con­tent through Springerís web­site and, as a bonus, all ORCS atten­dees will receive a hard bound issue of the ORCS Pro­ceed­ings. We wel­come feed­back on this change from all mem­bers (email: chair@​orcs.​org). Those con­sid­er­ing sub­mit­ting abstracts / man­u­scripts will be inter­est­ed to know that three focus top­ics will be: catal­y­sis applied to chem­i­cal pro­duc­tion from biore­new­able resources, C-X cou­pling reac­tions and hydro­gena­tion catal­y­sis. These top­ics will form the basis for spe­cial ses­sions, in addi­tion to the tra­di­tion­al scope of ORCS con­fer­ences.

At each bien­ni­al con­fer­ence of the ORCS two tech­ni­cal awards may be con­ferred by the Soci­ety for excel­lence if the field of catal­y­sis applied to organ­ic prod­ucts: the Mur­ray Raney Award and the Paul Rylan­der Award. The lat­ter is an annu­al award and two awardees may be rec­og­nized at the con­fer­ence. Nom­i­na­tions, com­pris­ing a CV and two sup­port­ing let­ters, are due Sept 8, 2010 to chair@​orcs.​org. Awardees receive an hon­o­rar­i­um and trav­el expens­es and are invit­ed to give a ple­nary lec­ture. Details may be found at www​.orcs​.org.

At the 23rd Con­fer­ence, ORCS will spon­sor an edu­ca­tion­al course: Hydro­gena­tion: An Indis­pens­able Tool. This three hour course will be pre­sent­ed Tues­day Mar 16, 2010 at the con­fer­ence hotel and will be taught by lead­ers from the chem­i­cal indus­try. Course top­ics span het­ero­ge­neous and homo­ge­neous catal­y­sis, as well as, safe­ty in the catal­y­sis lab­o­ra­to­ry and pilot plants or scale-up lab­o­ra­to­ries. The course will be pro­vid­ed for a nom­i­nal fee to con­fer­ence atten­dees and is also avail­able as a one day reg­is­tra­tion. Inter­est­ed par­ties will find more infor­ma­tion at www​.orcs​.org.