Index

Aims.

To provide a novel, near-instant and very low cost forum for organic chemists wishing to discuss the most exciting and topical developments in the chemistry of carbon-containing molecules. Invited and submitted contributions from all areas of contemporary organic chemistry, including synthesis, structure, mechanism, physical organic, new materials, bio-organic and computational studies were included.
A simple mechanism for discussing the conference contributions using electronic mail techniques was provided.
Participants were able to acquire "hyperactive" two and three dimensional representations of molecules under discussion.
The use of the World-Wide Web as a novel and complementary mechanism to traditional conferences, talks and journals was promoted and general awareness amongst the chemical community of the possibilities of electronic communication media was raised.

For general articles on electronic chemistry conferences, see

H. S. Rzepa, B. J. Whitaker and M. J. Winter, J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Commun., 1994, 1907
J. H. Krieger and D. L. Illman, Chem. & Eng. News, 1994 (December 12), p29; J. H. Krieger, Chem. & Eng. News, 1995 (August 21) p35
s. M. Bachrach, J. Chem. Inf. Comp. Science, 1995, 35, 431.
H. S. Rzepa, Tr. Analyt. Chem., 1995, 14, 240.
M. J. Winter, H. S. Rzepa and B. J. Whitaker, Chem. Brit., 1995, 685.

The following terms and dates for the conference are set out below. There was no limit to the (free) registration to the e-mail discussion list. Copyright for any contribution resides with the conference organisers, to facilitate subsequent abstracting and distribution of the conference proceedings. Scholarly contributions to the conference in four categories were invited.

Invited Keynote papers from recognised experts.
Contributed Papers. These were subjected to independent refereeing. Papers were expected to report new scientific results, although some discussion of previous work by the authors was acceptable. There was no restriction on length, although authors were encouraged to follow approximate guidelines set by printed journals. Chemical Abstracts have indicated the following regarding the conference papers on the conference CD-ROM; "We will regard them as genuine scholarly works to be abstracted in the accepted way (assuming that they report new chemical information and are original publications)" As such we would not expect such contributions to be re-published elsewhere in the substantive form as submitted to this conference.
Authors were encouraged to make full use of 'multimedia' techniques in their paper, and in particular the use of "hyperlinks" within papers that add value to the discussion. Groups could submit more than one paper if on significantly different topics, and can also contribute posters. Each paper has an indicated an e-mail address for all correspondence in the form of a hyperlink of the type <A HREF="mailto:name@address.country">author</A>.
Conference Posters. Abstracts of the posters were refereed by the conference scientific advisory panel. Chemical Abstracts have stated following regarding posters; "Whether we abstract and index the posters will be based on our review of their individual contents. We will treat such documents as brief scientific communications suitable for abstracting as long as there is a clear presentation of a novel finding supported by some discussion and experimental data or scientific analysis, including equations, tables, graphs, or structural diagrams, and references".
A prize for the most meritorious contribution was awarded.
Electronic Mail discussion of the scholarly contributions is included in the final proceedings.

Key Dates.

Participants contributing a poster or paper to the conference, were asked to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words or a diagram summarising the main points, in the form of an e-mail message to ectoc-contrib@ic.ac.uk, by April 28, 1995. Full details are given here. These were refereed by the scientific advisory panel and contributors were informed whether the abstract was accepted by 5 May, 1995 at the latest. Authors of accepted abstracts were asked to submit a full version of the paper or poster to the conference editors by 2 June, 1995. Contributions made by this deadline were mounted on the conference World-Wide Web server by 12 June, 1995.
Discussion of the scientific contributions using electronic mail occured for a period of four weeks from 12 June to 7 July, 1995. These discussions have been added to the head of each relevant paper.
From the 23 June until 17 August, 1995, contributors had the opportunity to revise their paper or poster if they wished, or to withdraw it from the conference at this stage. From August 17, the scientific advisory panel arranged one independent referee to assess the contributions. Contributors were asked to consider any modifications suggested by referees and to resubmit final versions if appropriate.
The on-line revised versions of the papers will remain so for at least two years after July 14th, 1995. Chemical Abstracts have agreed to regard the conference proceedings in their final form as represented on the CD-ROM as genuine scholarly works to be abstracted in the accepted way.

What is World-Wide Web

The World-Wide Web is in essence a document delivery system which is bounded not so much by the physical restraints of a collection of paper or a computer disk, but of what is known as the Internet. Its growth over the last four years is without precedent, and it is being rapidly adopted by both academic and commercial interests to deliver a wide variety of digital information. The central metaphor used is that of the "hyperlink", in which an underlined word or phrase or image acts as the link to another "document fragment". Document in this context most often means a collection of structured text, but images, animations and sounds are also often used. With this conference, we hope that "chemical" werecome an additional accepted type. By this we mean that molecular co-ordinates, and perhaps spectral data, symbolic mathematics and other "semantically" rich documents can also be hyperlinked. The implications of this are profound, since no other mechanism for scientific communication has hitherto been able to offer such features. Suggestions for a new term which describe the nuances correctly are welcomed. Any improvement on "chemical collaboratory"? For further reading, consult the following (conventionally) published papers:

H. S. Rzepa, B. J. Whitaker and M. J. Winter, J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Commun., 1994, 1907.
J. H. Krieger and D. L. Illman, Chem. & Eng. News, 1994, 1994 (December 12), 29.
O. Casher, G. Chandramohan, M. Hargreaves, C. Leach, P. Murray-Rust, R. Sayle, H. S. Rzepa and B. J. Whitaker, J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans 2, 1995, 7..

Essentials for Participating

An "Internet Ready" PC, Mac or Unix Workstation (essential).
The official conference WWW browser is a Netscape version 1.1N, suitably configured to read papers and posters and to browse through e-mail discussions. If you acquired these instructions by means other than using Netscape itself, you should try to establish whether your computing support service has a copy. It should also be possible to acquire Netscape by activating suitable hyperlinks from within another WWW Browser. Other World-Wide Web Browsers such as MacWeb/WinWeb or NCSA Mosaic can also be used (optional).
The offical 2D Molfile viewer is ISIS/Draw 1.2 PC/Mac. You will need to suitably configure Netscape to recognise molfiles.
The official 3D coordinate viewer is RasMol-PC/RasMac Version 2.5 or 2.6 for rotatable molecular images. You will need to suitably configure Netscape to recognise molecular coordinates. Try clicking on the logo above to see if you have succeeded.
Software to listen to audio clips (optional).
Software to view MPEG animations (optional).

Downloading Programs.

Click here for the latest information.

OverView on Preparing Papers

Full details of the instuctions for preparing a paper for submission are available here for reference. We also encouraged authors to consider making use where appropriate of other "hypermedia" elements such as graphical images, molecular coordinates, spectra, sounds and animations. The basic procedure for preparing and submitting a paper or poster are outlined here.

Papers should be prepared using Microsoft Word 6, WordPerfect, Claris Works or any other word processor capable of saving in Microsoft "rtf" or in "HTML" format.
The primary preferred document type was Hypertext-Markup-Language (HTML). Instructions for converting "rtf" to HTML are available.
Submissions were also accepted in the original word processor format for conversion to HTML by the conference editors, but any requests to add hyperlinks and other hypertext related material to the content were at the editors' discretion. Submission of material was made using one of the following mechanisms (in order of preference);

By mounting the contribution in the form of HTML on a World-Wide Web server located at the author's own institution and submitting the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of this material by e-mail to ectoc-contrib@ic.ac.uk. Approximately 20 authors took advantage of this route.
By creating a single "archive" file of the HTML file and any associated graphical images and molecular coordinates in "Stuffit", "Compact Pro", "ZIP", "ARC" and other formats compatible with the program Stuffit Expander, and "attaching" this file to an electronic mail message sent to ectoc-contrib@ic.ac.uk. About 30 authors used this mechanism.
By "attaching" a binary Word Processor file to an electronic mail message sent to ectoc-contrib@ic.ac.uk. The binary file should be "uuencoded" (Windows) or "binhex" (Macintosh). A suitable program which can perform this encoding automatically is Eudora, available for Windows and Macintosh computers. About 20 authors used this route.
Anonymous ftp binary file transfer of a Word Processor file or "archive" file as defined above, to the server ftp.ch.ic.ac.uk, to be placed in the directory ectoc. Approximately ten authors did this.
As a collection of binary Word Processor or HTML files written to a 3.5" 720K, 800K or 1.4 MByte DOS or Macintosh formatted disk and sent by regular post to:
ECTOC Department of Chemistry Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY
We received two contributions in this manner.

No submissions on paper were accepted.

Instructions for Sending E-mail Messages

Comments on paper or poster were by sending a message to ectoc@ic.ac.uk. The number of the paper or poster as the first numeral in the subject field of your message was requested.

Enclosing Molecules: With this conference, we introduced an experimental method of "attaching" reaction schemes or molecules to e-messages. The intention was as follows;

To illustrate your argument with a structural diagram, people were asked to use a structure drawing program such as ISIS/Draw 1.2w, ChemDraw Pro 3.5 or other "tgf" compatible program.
This was saved as an MDL TEXT based "tgf" format. Molecular coordinates were be saved in "pdb" format.
An e-mail program such as Eudora, Eudora-PC, Pine, ELM or Netscape 1.1 itself was used to "attach" the tgf or pdb file with the message. The mail program had t be configured to recognise the molfile as having chemical content. See here for further details.
When the message was received by the ECTOC mailer, the text discussion and the tgf or pdb file were separated into two files and each were saved on the conference World-Wide Web server.
Within those pages, the attached tgf or pdb file were clearly identified via a hyperlink.
Clicking on the hyperlink will transfer the tgf or pdb file back to your computer. For tgf files, ISIS/Draw can be configured to perform this function. For examples, see here. RasMol was used for pdb files.