characteristics of a chemistry-based electronic journal. Features include keeping a HTML-based document database with a separate hyperlink database, maintaining rich meta-data (but not Dublin Core) characteristics about the objects, dynamically creating tables of contents for the journal and interfacing to a molecular database. This site continues to operate at http://chemcomm.clic.ac.uk/until March 1999, when the HyperWave license will expire. Key components have been archived on published CD-ROMs. Future deployment by the RSC will focus on commercially available products based on SGML object-oriented document databases, using the experience gained with Hyperwave.

"To develop and establish international standards in the area of the molecular sciences for the dissemination of semantically rich information within electronic journals"

1.2.1 Chemical MIME had been developed as part of the CLIC project and has now been implemented by numerous journals (Journal of Molecular Chemistry, The Internet Journal of Chemistry and Biochemistry are three particularly innovative examples). It is now a fully ratified IUPAC standard and has been implemented within three commercially developed browser plug-ins. The most successful of these plug-ins, Chime, was developed early in the CLIC project by our consultation with MDL Information systems, and is now very widely deployed within the entire chemical community.

1.2.2 In addition CLIC has closely followed the development of chemical mark- up language (CML), which is an application of XML, itself an extension of the original HTML development and deriving from SGML. Information about both CML and chemical MIME have been disseminated through the ECTOC series of Conference CD-ROMs to approximately eight thousand users world wide. Subsequent to the start of the CLIC project, this model has been followed by other journals (i.e. the ECSOC conference series).

1.2.3 Development of the necessary tools to assist authors with chemical markup continues at Cambridge University via a project termed UGRIC. This was designed to be a bench chemists' tool for storing data in a structured manner and would handle both spectral and experimental details.

1.2.4 Only two CLIC enhanced articles had used the VRML model format. The relative difficulty in authoring VRML had inhibited its more general use. Our evaluation of VRML is that it is a good for display purposes, but that only the very latest generation of computers are able to display the files perfectly, which had probably inhibited its uptake in the past. An article on the use of VRML authored by the Imperial CLIC members and written for a general audience would appear in the September issue of the RSC magazine "Chemistry in

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