I note with interest that the latest attempt to introduce a chemistry pre-print service ( http://www.chemweb.com/preprint?url=/CPS, this chemweb by the way having no association with this list of the same name) now has a collection of 6 pre-prints. A great deal has been written about the nature of preprints in many fora, and there would be no point in starting a major thread on this topic at this forum. But one or two comments might attract discussion! a) Have the major learned society and commercial publishers yet indicated whether they will accept articles that have been preprinted? The RSC and ACS policies are currently unclear, to say the least. The policy of Elsevier, indirectly via Chemweb.com, which it owns and which offers this preprint service, might be a particularly interesting one to find out! b) One of the preprints above reverses the issue in point a), ie its an article that has been rejected by two referees of a conventional journal, and is offered at this preprint service for us to make our own minds up! I suppose then its a postprint, or perhaps an altprint! An interesting issue, if preprint services start to offer a major component of previously rejected articles. c) I note that the the preprints above are technically quite unadventurous, ie they offer no "added value" other than electronic paper delivery and search. I would have thought that preprints especially should be augmented with additional "live" data for people to ascertain whether the conclusions drawn from it are correct. So, should preprints offer more than a "paper equivalent"? What do people think? d) Our chemistry library here recently debated whether to abandon paper entirely, and go over to e-journals. In an indication of how rapidly things are changing, last year we debated whether to augment our entirely paper based collection from a major learned society publisher with a few e-versions at extra cost. This year, we were accepting that we would have access to the entire collection electronically, and now found ourselves debating how many printed versions we should order at extra cost! Such complete dependence on e-journals is remarkable, but whether in the long term its healthy is another matter. What of countries where the infrastructures are not up to delivering e-journals? -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0)20 7594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 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)