From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl$##$lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Thu May 25 2000 - 03:59:36 EDT
Eva Horn Moeller writes:
> I really feel that something should be done about this, and the
> discussion ought to be taken to a higher level. What are the opinions of
> e.g. the Royal Chemical Society and the American Chemical Society on
> this issue?
The chemical society as a whole has allowed this to happen, by
tolerating the status quo for years, despite existiance of essentially
zero-cost publishing on the web. (For instance, consider the
electronical preprint archive for the physical community at
http://xxx.lanl.gov )
To counteract electronical publishing standard erosion as pushed by
the marketplace, a globally accepted open/noncommercial expandable
document publishing standard has to be defined (inasmuch chemical XML
doesn't qualify already), which has to have means of intelligent full
text, structure (unique SMILES or graphs) and (IR, MS, NMR) spectre
searching. These standards have to be implemented in OpenSource
software, putting the development into the hands of the users. All
this is not exactly rocket science so far.
This is all very doable, and in fact being partly done already, but is
being habitually ignored by the chemical community. Apart from
occasional laments, the comminity seems to like things just fine as
they are. Watching this happening for years is incredibly frustrating.
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