MDL Information Systems and Current Science Group issued a press release yesterday, announcing a new $6M "on-line club" for chemists, to be called ChemWeb. To quote the release: "ChemWeb will provide secure access to a large number of scientific journals, databases, and references as well as discussion groups, electronic meeting rooms, news services, a job exchange and a shopping mall. ChemWeb will build on the success of Current Science Group's BioMedNet, a popular web club for biological and medical scientists, and MDL's database and Web technologies which provide swift, flexible access to molecular and chemical data. Users will be able to search the entire site through text or chemical substructure. ..... ChemWeb will benefit from the design of BioMedNet's proprietary framework as well as MDL's ISIS and database products....ChemWeb will also incorporate MDL's recently announced Chemscape products. ...MDL will offer its chemical databases and Current Science Group will post its journals via ChemWeb. All academic and commercial information publishers will be able to provide services through ChemWeb." The companies will be previewing the site at ACS Orlando, 25-28 August. The press release is a bit sketchy on details, but $6M seems a major investment and it looks like the companies are aiming to make ChemWeb *the* major subscription chemistry service (with a $6M investment, you can bet that this won't be a free-access site!) So, (1) How does this affect this mailing list...can we expect horders of lawyers banging down Henry's door, demanding a name change? (2) Is this the wave of the future? Useful chemical content as a subscription-only service? (3) Most of the comments from this list so far have concerned the free end of the internet. However, there's a lot of people out there (particularly in industry), using these subscription services. Personally, I've never been in an institution that could afford the access fees. But those of you who do have access, what are your opinions? Do these services offer more than you could get for free? How do you rate the individual services? Are they good value-for-money? It would be great to hear some comments, as the subscription side of the internet is often ignored in the press and mailing list/newsgroups. ---------------- Paul Deards Internet Publisher Chemistry and Industry 0171-2353681 x233 pauld@chemind.demon.co.uk http://ci.mond.org/ ----- 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)