Peter M-R writes
This is a very important topic and one that every discipline and organisation is going to have to get to grips with. ... The first point to realise is that high-quality information is expensive. Not only data entry , but also checking, updating, and re-organisation of the material come with very high costs. ... ...As an example - let's assume that a historian of science wished to analyse the constent of this list in 20 years' time - would they be able to? ... This leaves a serious problem for archiving and maintenance of public data in the public domain. My own feeling is that the appropriate bodies to curate this for posterity are the learned societies, museums, research institutes and universities, but that in today's climate they will have to recover most of their costs by sale of services and data.
I would like to comment on two aspects. 1. The Computational chemistry list is around 4 years old. Its existence depends almost entirely on its moderator. During this period, several (5?) Gbytes of postings have been made, and in some ways, these encapsulate the evolution of comp chem during this period. About a year ago, it would have disappeared had the moderator not obtained a modest NSF 3 year grant, which stipulated that after this period, it had to become financially self-sustaining. Jan has posted around 22 proposed ways on how this might come about. Even so, he still has to raise substantial money from <<users>> to achieve this. Currently, at least in chemistry, we have NO model of a <<financially sustainable>> and working high-quality chemistry archive of the Internet which seems likely to be around in 20 years time (although we are close with several!) 2. Traditionally, Chemical Abstracts has fulfilled this role. They currently claim they ARE abstracting the chemical Internet, although one would be hard pressed to identify their guidelines for what qualifies. Ironically, their first action is often to PRINT the item. CA have a imprimateur of quality, although the cost of this is high, and this traditional cost often disenfranchises the very people who contributed in the first place! 3. My own feeling is that the way forward is for the emergence of high quality editing, and that as Peter suggests, the sooner that the types of organisation noted above start organising this, the better! As a closing remark, as Peter does, I wonder what the future of this very list might/should be? Its a year old, and in a minor way, charts the development of the chemical Internet during that period. But, does it deserve to be available in whatever form on 20 years time? Like the Bernard Shaw letters, should we enable some historian from that time to write the definitive work on it? Henry Rzepa. +44 171 594 5774 (Office) +44 594 5804 (Fax) ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)