From Henry Rzepa, Imperial College, London
“Storming the barricades” by Robert Matthews (17 June) describes a future model attributed to Andrew Odlyzko in which the World Wide Web could be used as an alternative and more equitable system of peer review in science. However, fully functioning models along these lines are already in action. For example the ECTOC (Electronic Conference on Trends in Organic Chemistry) forum (http://www.ch.ic.ac. uk/ectoc/) has attracted wide global support and interest and many high-quality papers.
What was not mentioned was an even more important aspect of such a forum, namely the ways the Web can enhance quality and understanding. Thus ECTOC uniquely offers “built-in” molecular hyperglossary to which readers can contribute and which could serve to rapidly identify trends in a collection of articles, full keyword and molecule indexing, current access statistics, chem-mail in which molecular models can be enclosed with e-mail discussions, and hyperlinking to other articles and databases.
One paper even has the first example of the use of VRML, the virtual reality modelling language, to enable participants to explore for themselves complex 3D molecular wave functions.
Such scientific collaborations offer far more than the traditional printed journal can, and represent perhaps the best hope of increasing quality, perception and appreciation of what are traditionally regarded as difficult subjects. Britain is a world leader in such technologies, and the prospects look even better with the recently announced government funding for some 30 “e-lib” projects to promote innovation in information delivery – the FIGIT initiative.
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