Archive for March 21st, 2024

Internet Archeology: reviving a 2001 article published in the Internet Journal of Chemistry.

Thursday, March 21st, 2024

In the mid to late 1990s as the Web developed, it was becoming more obvious that one area it would revolutionise was of scholarly journal publishing. Since the days of the very first scientific journals in the 1650s, the medium had been firmly rooted in paper. Even printed colour only became common (and affordable) from the 1980s. An opportunity to move away from these restrictions was provided by the Web. Early adopters of this medium in chemistry were the CLIC pilot project[1] in 1995 and the Internet Journal of Chemistry (IJC), the latter offering “enhanced chemical publication which permits the publication of materials which cannot be published on paper and end-use customization which permits the readers to read articles prepared for their specific needs“.[2] Publication of the latter started in January 1998, offering “authors the opportunity to enhance their articles by fully incorporating multimedia, large data sets, Java applets, color images and interactive tools.” The journal remained online for seven years, after which it was closed and the articles became inaccessible. By then many major chemistry journals had started evolving along some of the same lines, and it could be argued this journal had served its purpose of alerting both publishers and authors to these new opportunities. Here I describe how an IJC article published in 2001 was brought back to life in more or less the enhanced manner intended.[3]

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References

  1. D. James, B.J. Whitaker, C. Hildyard, H.S. Rzepa, O. Casher, J.M. Goodman, D. Riddick, and P. Murray‐Rust, "The case for content integrity in electronic chemistry journals: The CLIC project", New Review of Information Networking, vol. 1, pp. 61-69, 1995. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614579509516846
  2. S.M. Bachrach, "The 21st century chemistry journal", Química Nova, vol. 22, pp. 273-276, 1999. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0100-40421999000200020
  3. H. Rzepa, "Internet Archeology: an example of a revitalised molecular resource with a new activity now built in.", 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.59350/9c769-34y25

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