On Jun 2, 6:22pm, Rzepa, Henry wrote:

http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/

Thanks for the URL! It saves people some work.

Of these 6000, it seems the very large majority are in fact "journals delivered electronically"...

I think you are being lenient. Many seem to be journals that have just advertised themselves on the Web. Many only have abstracts. Very few delivery of "printable" documents, as you say.

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"... Is this assumption justified?

Yes, I think it is. As Joe Leonard pointed out in another post, hardcopy is portable. It can stuffed in a folder or a briefcase. And it can be annotated by the user. HTML versions of documents do not offer those capabilities. Furthermore, the questions in my mind is how long will the full-fledged HTML documents with animation and Java scripts and all the gee-whiz features remain available on the Web. Where is the "library" that will allow the user to access these documents in later years? A hardcopy can reside in my file cabinet until needed. Can we say the same about all the WWW documents available today?

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.

I don't agree with this statement. IMHO, e-journals offer me in this order of impact or importance: (1) Easy access from my desk to review abstracts and to scan interesting articles. (2) A means to print these articles from my desk (and in the case of PDF files, with better quality print) (3) Ready access to supplementary material (4) Multimedia presentations Other folks have different opinions but this is how I see e-journals being useful right now.

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?

Both. Printable media (and I would say PDF is the best standard followed by Postscript) will have it's uses for the immediate future. But e-journals could provide so much more to the reader with multimedia presentations. Until these multimedia aspects of journals can be made portable and easily stored locally, printable documents will still be required. -- Jeffrey L. Nauss, PhD Telephone: 513-556-0148 Dir. Molec. Model. Serv. Fax: 513-556-9239 Department of Chemistry e-mail: Jeffrey.Nauss@UC.Edu University of Cincinnati URL http://www.che.uc.edu/~nauss 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)