I have just returned from a "multimedia publishing" conference in Finland. Amongst the talks was one about the "NewJour" project, which tracks all new electronic journals. It has about 11 entries only for chemistry. Ann Okerson gave a talk in Finland about the project, and estimated perhaps 6000 journals would be electronic by the end of this year. http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/ Of these 6000, it seems the very large majority are in fact "journals delivered electronically" rather than "2nd generation true electronic journals". In turn, electronic delivery of journals seems to correspond to delivery of "printable" documents, eg predominantly in PDF format. Few journals can be described as "multimedia" or offering features not possible with paper. Those that do seem to concentrate on e.g. MPEG animation. Several speakers presented e-journals where the boundary condition was that an Acrobat PDF version was being provided so that "people could print any article they were interested in". The widespread assumption still is that pretty much everyone will hit the "print" button the moment they find something sufficiently interesting that they want to study it in depth. Is this assumption justified? Does the chemistry community want more from its e-journals, or will PDF suffice over the next few years? Certainly, it is much favoured in the more mathematical areas of chemistry, for well justified reasons. Jessie Hey from the Open Journal project at Southampton started from Vannevar Bush and Eugene Garfield, and described e-journals as pre-eminently offering (hyper)links as THE additional value that an e-journal can offer. Such link databases can be constructed between different e-journal articles (interesting, a process the author themself is NOT involved in), and its this LINKING that according to this model of the e-journal, is what readers really want (I note that we actually did this as part of ECHET96; see Earlier this year, we spent some time producing and testing the CD corresponding to the proceedings of the ECHET96 conference, but one of the areas we did not concentrate on was to ensure its "printability". I gather that the subsequent abstracting of this CD by CAS was delayed because this mandated printing the entire product prior to its abstracting. Both these observations lead me to ask what the fate of any non-printable representation of chemistry that imparts knowledge or undertanding to new scientific results might be? So, is the near future of electronic chemistry journals destined to be simply a delivery mechanism for documents that if destined to be read by the reader, have to be printed? Or should the chemistry community be pressing learned society and commercial publishers for e-journals that can deliver "models" encoded via software rather than words, and to develop non-printable ways of archiving such information? Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 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)