I wrote a story on Chemistry Webmasters 3 for the Alchemist on chemweb.com, and asked CAS for an interview about their policy on abstracting web documents. The reply came too late for the Alchemist piece, but here it is if anyone is interested. Becky Allen CA Editor, David Weisgerber says: "CAS Coverage of Chemical Information on the Internet Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) abstract and index coverage of chemical science resources on the Internet is currently limited to electronic-only journals and online web-based conferences. Internet documents are selected for coverage on the basis of criteria that are similar to those applied to the corresponding printed journals and conference proceedings. These criteria are: 1. The documents report new information of chemical or chemical engineering interest. 2. They present information in a form similar to that of a scientific paper. This means that they present novel findings with some discussion of the experimental details, research, or theoretical considerations that support the findings. 3. They identify authorship, either personal or organizational. 4. They are publicly available (not necessarily free, but not restricted in some manner to a particular audience). 5. They are expected to have some relative permanence or continued accessibility through a citable electronic address. 6. They are original publications (i.e., they have not been published previously in another form or medium) and their content is expected to remain unchanged. CAS coverage currently includes articles published in electronic-only journals and presented during online web-based conferences. It does not include preprints, news releases, websites, abstracts, or messages placed on electronic bulletin boards or listservs. In the cases of established print journals that are also made available in electronic full-text forms, the printed journals remain the primary sources for CAS coverage." chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)