An interesting incident occurred here last week which I thought I might share here, because of the interesting implications it has. Access to one publisher's ejournals here at Imperial was discovered to be barred one morning; urgent enquiries established that one possible cause was an apparent detection by the publisher of "systematic downloading" of articles from one journal by "suspected automated means". I think in fact that most publishers have clauses somewhere in their conditions of use which prohibit this. It is ironic of course that whilst computers and software have automated and systematised much else in the scientific publishing process, the actual act of downloading a file must still apparently be done by manual means. Juxtapose this onto the vision some have of a "Semantic Web" where machine software is enabled to do many (routine) actions currently done in a slow (and error prone manner) by humans. The "chemical semantic web" is young still, but some small aspects could be achieved. One could easily imagine bibliographic software which could be primed with user keywords (metadata) to automatically retrieve articles from journals of interest to its (human!) controller, perhaps initiated by the RSS mechanism I posted to this forum a few weeks ago. I suspect however that such use would probably contravene many a publishers conditions of use. It will be interesting to see how publishers respond to such trends, or conversely whether the limitations imposed by publishers inhibit the development of such automation. -- Henry Rzepa. Imperial College, Chemistry Dept. +44 0778 626 8220 +44 020 7594 5804 (Fax) chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)