1995: The Case for Content Integrity in Electronic Chemistry Journals. The CLIC Project.

There is currently intense debate on the future role of electronic journals in all subject disciplines. The debate carried primarily by traditional publishers has focused on subject independent issues such as the ‘look and feel’ of the electronic product, copyright protection and charging mechanisms. Whilst such issues are certainly important, other issues which are felt to be important by specific user community have not received similar publicity. Arguing specifically from the particular perspective of science and chemistry in particular, we contend in this article that electronic journals should also be perceived as a new form of scientific instrument, in allowing the delivery to the user of manipulable 3D molecular images, instrumental data, symbolic algorithms capable of evaluation locally, and other semantically intact molecular data for re‐use locally by the reader.