Privacy Policy

This webpage sets out when and how we use your personal information that you or others provide to us.

Who We Are
CAS
ACS Publications
C&EN
How Do You Use My Data?
What About Technical Information And Analytics?
Cookies
Where Is My Data Stored?
How Long Do We Retain Your Data?
Your Right To Object Under Data Protection Laws
What Are My Rights Under Data Protection Laws?
What About Websites To Which We Link?
When Will You Change Your Privacy Policy?
How Do I Contact You With Feedback?

Who We Are

We are the American Chemical Society, an American federally-chartered, non-profit organization (Federal ID No. 53-0196572). References in this policy to “the Society”, “we”, “us” or “our” are to the American Chemical Society.

Our registered address is 1155 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036.

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CAS

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is a division of the Society. CAS is located at 2540 Olentangy River Road, Columbus, Ohio, 43202-1505, U.S.A.

If CAS handles your data, they shall do so in accordance with this privacy policy.

For CAS customers, please address questions, comments and requests related to this privacy policy to privacy@acs.org.

You can tell CAS that you do not want your personal information to be processed at any time by contacting CAS at privacy@acs.org.

You can tell CAS that you do not want your personal information to be processed at any time by following the unsubscribe link shown in every marketing communication you receive from CAS.

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ACS Publications

ACS Publications is a division of the Society located at 1155 Sixteenth Street, NW Washington DC 20036.

If ACS Publications handles your data, they shall do so in accordance with this privacy policy.

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C&EN

Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) is an independent news organization, and a division of the Society.

If C&EN handles your data, they shall do so in accordance with this privacy policy.

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How Do You Use My Data?

When you become a member

When you become a member of the American Chemical Society, we will use your personal information to process your membership application and provide you with your membership information and benefits. The details we collect from you when you become a member include your name, address, email address, phone number, payment details, academic/industry affiliation and sector preferences.

To complete your membership application, we share your personal information with our subcontractors, e.g., payment processors, who are involved in the membership application process.

We need to process your personal information in this way to register you as a member and provide the ongoing membership services and benefits to you, as part of your membership contract with us.

When you submit an article for publication or subscribe to a journal

When you submit an article for publication, we collect information from you, such as: your name, address, email address, phone number, job title, employer/academic institution, and biographical information.  We use this information to ensure appropriate attribution and identify you as the author of the article.  We provide your information to other publishers and distribution services to ensure a wide distribution and access to your article by interested parties.

When you use our products and/or services (e.g., SciFinder, journal subscription)

When you use our products and services, we collect such information from you as: your name, address, email address, phone number, job title, employer/academic institution, individual demographic data, and payment details (if applicable).

We use this information to verify whether you have an active account or subscription with us, and to make sure you can access the services you have signed up to receive. We also use the information collected from you to improve our products and services and to provide customized content to you, including, for example, improved searching and search results. We may provide your information to other third parties to optimize or enhance your access to our services.

We need to collect and use your personal information in this way to carry out the contract in place between us.

When you attend one of our national meetings or industry events

When you attend one of our events (such as the national meeting), we will collect the following information from you: name, address, email address, phone number, employer/academic institution, individual demographic data and payment details. If you are already a member and register to attend an event, we will use the equivalent membership details we already hold on file for you to confirm your booking, and you can update the data during the transaction.  The details we collect from you will include your name, address, payment and other contact details. We need to use your personal information in this way to complete the booking contract between us.

We provide a delegate list to the organizations and other individuals who attend our events. We do this because our events provide a useful networking opportunity, and we have a legitimate interest in wanting to help build and develop the scientific community. You can object to us using your information in this way by contacting us using the information provided at the time of registration.

When you attend one of our educational sessions or sign-up for our webinars

When you attend one of our educational sessions, short courses, workshops, (such as Short Courses Learning Management and Classroom sessions) or webinars we will collect the following information from you: name, address, employer/academic institution and payment details. If you are already a member and register to attend a session or webinar, we may use some of the membership details we already hold on file for you to confirm your booking, and you can update the data during the transaction.

The details we collect from you will include your name, address, payment details, phone number and email address. We need to use your personal information in this way to complete the booking contract between us.

When you phone us, email us, or use our website chat service

When you phone us or contact us by chat or email with general queries, or when we support your use of our products and services, we may also handle your personal information (your name, contact details and the other details you provide to us) in order to provide the customer services you have requested. This could be when you contact us to provide customer support for questions you may have with regard to membership, subscriptions, payments and other service type inquiries, or when you ask for our assistance troubleshooting issues with our products or services, explaining how our products or services work, or if you request information about new products and/or services. All phone calls are recorded for quality assurance and training purposes, and an announcement to that effect is included in our greeting. We record phone calls because we have a legitimate interest in monitoring the quality of our calls, and training our staff using live examples.

Unless we are contracted to provide this support, we rely on your consent to handle your personal information in this way. If you do not provide us with the personal information we request from you for customer services purposes, we may not be able to fully answer your queries.

When you have expressed an interest in the Society:

This section applies if you have opted in to receive marketing communications from us, or have previously expressed an interest in the Society and not opted out.

When you sign up to one of our webinars, whitepapers, or take one of our quizzes your registration details may be disclosed to the webinar sponsor. We rely on our legitimate interest to promote and develop the scientific community when we transfer your data to the sponsors.

We will handle your personal information (such as your name, email address, postal address, telephone number, job title, employer/academic institution and sector preferences) to provide you with marketing communications in line with any preferences about which you have told us.

When we send you marketing emails because you have opted-in to receive them, we rely on your consent to contact you for marketing purposes.

If you have not opted-in and we send you marketing communications, we do this because of our legitimate interest to promote the success of the Society.

Every email we send to you for marketing purposes will also contain instructions on how to unsubscribe from receiving them.

You are not under any obligation to provide us with your personal data for marketing purposes.

You can tell us that you do not want your personal information to be processed in this way at any time by contacting us at service@acs.org or, where relevant, by following the unsubscribe link shown in every marketing communication you receive from us.

When you create an ACS ID, a set of digital access credentials:

When you create an ACS ID, the set of credentials that allow us to authenticate your use of ACS websites and applications, we will collect the following information from you: name, email address, institution, username and password. We may also collect your ACS member number to provide you with access to ACS member-only content.

We need to process your data for this reason to provide the contracted services you have requested.

To make our site, products and services better and to increase our membership base:

We will also use your personal information to provide you with a more effective user experience (such as by displaying articles and links in which we think you will be interested).

Our use of your personal information in this way means that your experience of our site will be more tailored to you, and that the articles and links you see on our site may differ from someone accessing the same site with a different history or browsing habits.

We also share your aggregated, anonymous data with third party analytics and search engine providers that assist us in the improvement and optimization of our site.

We will also use your personal information for the purposes of making our site, products and services more secure, and to administer our site and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes. We process your data for this reason because we have a legitimate interest to provide you with the best experience we can, to continue increasing our membership base and to ensure that our site, products and services are kept secure.

You can prevent us from using your personal information in this way by using the 'do not track' functionality in your internet browser. If you enable the ‘do not track’ functionality, our site may be less tailored to your needs and preferences.

If our business or our assets are sold:

We will transfer your personal information to a third party:

• if we sell or buy any business or assets, we will provide your personal information to the seller or buyer (but only to the extent we need to, and always in accordance with data protection legislation); or
• if the Society or the majority of its assets are acquired by somebody else, in which case the personal information held by the Society will be transferred to the buyer.

We process your personal information for this purpose because we have a legitimate interest to maintain business continuity and to ensure our business can be continued by the buyer. If you object to our use of your personal information in this way, the relevant buyer of our business may not be able to provide services to you.

In some circumstances we may also need to share your personal information if we are under a duty to disclose or share it to comply with a legal obligation.

Children’s Guidelines:

The Society (www.acs.org) meets the guidelines of TRUSTe’s Children’s program.

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What About Technical Information And Analytics?

Information we collect about you: When you visit our site we will automatically collect the following information:

• technical information, including the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the internet, your login information, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, screen resolution, operating system and platform; and
• information about your visit, including the full Uniform Resource Locators, clickstream to, through and from our site (including date and time), page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs) and methods used to browse away from the page.

Information we receive from other sources: We are also working closely with third party advertising networks, analytics providers, hosting providers and search information providers from whom we may also receive general aggregated anonymous information about you.

We may implement the Google Analytics demographics and interest reporting features on our websites. These tools allow us to review anonymous data regarding the gender, age and interests of website visitors and adapt our website content to better reflect their needs. Although this information is collected through your Google Ad settings, it is not provided to us in a personally-identifiable format. This means we cannot identify information about you, and we will not try to figure it out. If we do utilize this feature, you can opt-out of Google Analytics for Display Advertising and customize Google Display Network ads using the Google Ad settings or through the Google Analytics opt-in browser add-on.

We also use Google and Adobe analytics data and the DoubleClick cookie to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to our website. Site visitors may opt out of the DoubleClick cookie by visiting opt out of seeing Google personalized ads  or they may opt out of Google Analytics by visiting the Google Analytics opt-out page  or the Adobe Analytics opt-out page. Google has additional information available here about their Remarketing Privacy Guidelines, Policies and Restrictions.

Unless otherwise stated, we will combine the information you provide to us with information we collect about you.

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Cookies

Our site uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our site. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our site and also allows us to improve our site. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer. We only use (and store) non-essential cookies on your computer's browser or hard drive if you provide your consent.

We use cookies that are essential in allowing users access to our websites and their features. We use cookies to collect information about how visitors use our website – the information is used to optimize and improve navigation. We use cookies to gather information from users on social media and other platforms.  These cookies are used to measure the effectiveness of advertising and to target content to user’s interests. And, we use cookies that enable us to learn more about the goods and services others provide that interest you and are related to goods and services that we provide after you leave our website. This cookie enables us to improve our value proposition to you should you return.

The following table of cookies is illustrative and not intended to be exhaustive:

Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we do not have any control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.

You can block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site.

Except for essential cookies, all cookies will expire after 2 years.

To learn more about how cookies are used on ACS.org and to see your options for managing those cookies, please visit our cookies policy.

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Where Is My Data Stored?

We (and many of our external third parties) are based outside the European Economic Area (EEA) so their processing of your personal information will involve a transfer of data outside of the EEA.

Whenever we transfer your personal information outside of the EEA, we ensure it is protected by making sure at least one of the following safeguards is in place:

• by transferring your personal information to a country that has been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection by the European Commission;
• by using specific contracts approved by the European Commission which give your personal information the same protection it has if it was in the EEA;
• where we use providers based in the US, we may transfer data to them if they are part of the Privacy Shield which requires them to provide similar levels of protection to personal data shared between Europe and the US as if It was in the EEA.

To keep this privacy policy as short and easy to understand as possible, we have not set out the specific circumstances when each of these protection measures are used. For the details as to how we protect specific transfer of your data, you can contact the ACS Legal Department, by mail at 1155 Sixteenth Street, NW Washington, DC 20036 or by email at privacy@acs.org.

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers or those of our third party data storage providers. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. You must not share your password with anyone.

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How Long Do We Retain Your Data?

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

If you tell us that you no longer wish to receive marketing communications from us, we promise to stop sending them to you.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research, product development or improvement, or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

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Your Right To Object Under Data Protection Laws

Depending on your location, you may have the right to object to us handling your personal information when:

• we are handling your personal information based on our legitimate interests (as described in the “How do you use my data” section above). If you ask us to stop handling your personal information in this way, we will stop unless we can show you that we have compelling grounds as to why our use of your personal information should continue; or
• for marketing purposes. If you ask us to stop handling your personal information on this basis, we will stop. We will then only hold very limited data about you to make sure we do not contact you again.

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What Are My Rights Under Data Protection Laws?

Depending on your location, you may have various rights under the data protection laws, which you can exercise by contacting the ACS Legal Department, by mail at 1155 Sixteenth Street, NW Washington, DC 20036 or by email at privacy@acs.org.  

If you exercise your right under data protection laws, your request may be subject to a fee, if we are permitted to charge a fee. We will let you know at the time you make your request whether there is a fee to pay.

Right of access

You may be entitled to receive confirmation as to whether your personal information is being processed by us, as well as various other information relating to our use of your personal information.

You may also have the right to access your personal information which we are handling.

Right to rectification

You may have the right to require us to rectify any inaccurate personal information we hold about you. You also have the right to have incomplete personal information we hold about you completed, by providing a supplementary statement to us.

Right to restriction

You may be able to restrict our processing of your personal information where:

• you think we hold inaccurate personal information about you;
• our handling of your personal information breaks the law, but you do not want us to delete it;
• we no longer need to process your personal information, but you want us to keep it for legal reasons; or
• where we are handling your personal information because we have a legitimate interest (as described in the “How do you use my data?” section above), and are in the process of objecting to this use of your personal information.

If you exercise your right to restrict us from using your personal information, we will then only process your personal information when you agree, except for storage purposes and to handle legal claims.

Right to data portability

You may have the right to receive your personal information in a structured, standard machine readable format and to send this to another organization controlling your personal information.

This right only applies to your personal information we are handling because you consented to us using it or because there is a contract in place between us.

Right to erasure

You may have the right to require us to erase your personal information which we are handling in the following circumstances:

• where we no longer need to use your personal information for the reasons we told you we collected it;
• where we needed your consent to use your personal information, you have withdrawn your consent and there is no other lawful way we can continue to use your personal information;
• when you object to our use of your personal information and we have no compelling reason to carry on handling it;
• if our handling of your personal information has broken the law; and
• when we must erase your personal information to comply with a law we are subject to.

Right to complain

You may have the right to lodge a complaint with the relevant supervisory authority for data protection issues in your territory. As we conduct business globally, we have not set out the specific supervisory authorities for each country in this policy, but please contact us if you would like us to identify who the relevant supervisory authority is in your country or territory.

Please be aware that we may also need to use your personal information if it is relevant to a legal claim that is being pursued.

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What About Websites To Which We Link?

Our site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks and affiliates.

Our site connects you to different websites.  If you follow a link to any of these websites or use our services, please note that you have left our site and these websites have their own privacy policies.

We do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies or websites.  Please check their policies before you submit any personal information to these websites.

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When Will You Change Your Privacy Policy?

Any changes we make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page and, where appropriate, notified to you by e-mail or post.

Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our privacy policy.

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How Do I Contact You With Feedback?

Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy policy are welcomed and should be addressed to us by mail at ACS Legal Department, 1155 Sixteenth Street, NW Washington, DC 20036 or by email at privacy@acs.org

The representative we have appointed in the EU is ACS International Ltd. You can contact ACS International by email at acsiprivacy@acs-i.org  or by writing to ACS International Ltd., Prama House, 267 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 7HT, United Kingdom, and Attention: ACSI Legal Department

This privacy policy was last updated on March 4, 2022.

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