The future of Organic Chemistry on-line journals?

[Rzepa, Henry]

In note with some interest the author instructions for the new Springer journal
"Molecules on-line". 

http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00783/instr.htm

 Intrigued as to whether this meant that the
molecules themselves would be  "hyperactive", as we coined 
in 1994,  I  was intrigued to find statements such as

"Spectra ... must be submitted as images, preferably in form of
 PostScript file or a scanned file"

and structure diagrams must be prepared according to

"10pt Helvetica font 
fixed length 14.4 pt (0.508 cm, 0.2 in.) 
bold width 2.0 pt (0.071 cm, 0.0278 in.) 
line width 0.6 pt (0.021 cm, 0.0083 in.) "

which are instructions clearly designed with printing in mind.There is
a supplementary data section, but this implies this data will only appear on the
CD-ROM version. The word "supplementary" implies 
that this is the least important aspect of the
article submission process, and not really an integral part of it or the
actual article.

It would appear that (to publishers at least), "on-line" still means 

"electronic delivery of a facsimile of a printed journal"  

rather than

"electronic delivery of an enhanced chemistry information tool with no printed equivalent"

After about  four years of the Internet and the Web, it does seem that the
publishing world remains very conservative. Perhaps that is because 
the consumers are even more conservative, and do not wish to have
any of these enhanced features ?  I am sure most of the subscribers
to this forum would dissent, but are we a tiny minority?  Or are the
publishers making these decisions on our behalf, based of course 
on their commercial interests, rather than necessarily our scientific
interests? 


Dr Henry Rzepa,  Dept. Chemistry,  Imperial College,  LONDON SW7 2AY;
mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk; Tel  (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 
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