Subject: On-line chemistry and electronic publishing via www.

From: [email-masked] (Henry Rzepa) (Henry Rzepa)
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 1994 19:09:38 +0000

I note with some interest Jan's information that Wiley and Springer-Verlag
have released their contents pages to www.ccl.net
Could I sound out opinions on the following:
a) whether a www server might also be used for this purpose? For
example, we already have some chemistry material on ours, and the ease
of implementation suggests that growth might be explosive in this area!
b) whether a method such as www might or should be used for say "graphical"
abstracts of the type favoured by say Angew Chemie, or the RSC Perkin
journals, even if the full versions cannot be submitted for eg copyright
reasons.
c) Whether www might be suitable for otherwise VERY expensive colour
plates? I have just received a request from one publisher for
$2200 for printing a small colour diagram in a paper. I gather the real cost
is at least this. Mounting the thing on www (or gopher) would be a zero
cost item. Do any commercial publishers listening favour
this idea? My soundings are that they are in two minds about protocols such
as www, feeling on the one hand threatened in their hitherto dominance
and control over scientific publishing, and on the other hand severely
worried about dropping journals sales. See
http:/www.ch.ic.ac.uk/RSC/P2/3_07186C.html
for an example of how it might be done!
d) whether the chemical community should be actively lobbying those
involved in www and gopher development. For example, my contacts
with David Johnson of Minnesota have been highly useful in promoting
gopher+ as a chemists tool. Now that the www is moving into html+
as a scripting language, we as chemists need to make our needs known!
e) If we can all become publishers by mounting a www document (or
preprint), how do we handle refereeing, long term archiving, quality
control and proofing, and indeed time-stamping and preventing fraud!
Could publishers exist solely for  (and make money from)
a role as "authentication agents"?

Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY.
Tel: +44 71 225 8339. Fax: +44 71 589 3869. E-mail: [email-masked]
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa.html. Sent via MacPPP/MacTCP using Eudora 2.01.