The Computational Chemistry List (CCL) is dedicated to fostering communication within the world-wide community of researchers involved in chemistry-focused computation.
To achieve this ambitious goal, CCL has, from its birth in January 1991, provided an electronic forum for computational chemists to:
Within the past few years, driven by user needs and only made possible by increases in funding, CCL has expanded its original mission to include providing users with a repository of computational chemistry research aids.
To this end, a website was created to house these archives which range from documents that explain a particular area of computational chemistry to free software tools.
Today's scientific environment -- problems, solutions, tools, funding -- is becoming increasingly more complex. CCL recognizes this and believes that the most productive discussion is generated by a diversity of perspectives.
Consequently, from its inception, CCL has always kept its discussion open to the general public.
This academic perspective has allowed it to fulfill needs left otherwise unmet, e.g. a place for daily cross-fertilization of ideas between academic and industrial researchers around the world.
At the beginning of summer 2000, 40% of CCL's subscribers are in the U.S. with the remaining 60% in over 50 other countries on all inhabited continents. By analyzing domains from CCL's subscribers' addresses, we know you come from a diversity of workplaces: educational(50%), commercial(36%), government(5.5%), military (2%), non-profit(1.5%) with the remainder being unclassified -- coming from ISP providers.
The only restriction is that discussion be legitimately focused on the topic of computational chemistry; however, any level of discussion is allowed -- from beginning through advanced. Consequently, CCL is also serving in an educational capacity to its subscribers.
Also, some seemingly "simple" questions provoke far-reaching discussions. Even answers to simple questions may call to mind once again knowledge which we had once possessed but had since been covered with dust.
CCL is also an important educational resource on the inside.
CCL is run by student maintainers and, over the years, has provided them a training ground in which they have obtained significant practical computer training. So, be assured -- your support has and will continue to have far-reaching educational consequences.
And, unique to CCL, anyone -- not just subscribers -- may post a message. This is similiar to the policy used by Usenet news groups; however, unlike most news groups, CCL is practically spam-free due to elaborate filters and the vigilance of the student maintainers who sift gold from dirt every day.
As such, CCL -- with a minimal noise-level and cost-free to the subscriber -- taps into the vast experience and collective knowledge of the entire world of computational chemists.
Today, CCL has thousands of subscribers -- the exact number of which is unknown.
Recently, a growing number of people choose to post and monitor CCL messages via the Web. And, judging from network traffic, it is clear that the CCL audience continues to expand.
Keeping pace with this increasing activity requires continually expanding our system, network, and people resources.