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Pure Appl. Chem.,
Vol. 71, No. 8, pp. 1587-1591, 1999
Guidelines for
the use of the Internet by IUPAC bodies
(Technical Report)
A.N. Davies,
S.R. Heller and J. W. Jost
ABSTRACT
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INTRODUCTION
The meeting of the Committee on Printed and Electronic Publications,
24-25 August 1997 in Geneva recognized the need for a set of guidelines
for IUPAC bodies wishing to extend their activities onto the Internet.
It was also clear that certain strategic decisions needed to be taken
regarding the use and maintenance of the main IUPAC web site. The Internet
provides an excellent tool for increasing the profile of the Union.
The main product of the Union is the publications and recommendations
of the different commissions. It was felt that in order to maintain
the high quality of information emanating from the Union urgent steps
needed to be taken to ensure that the rapid introduction of the Internet
into scientific life did not result in a lowering of the quality of
information linked to the IUPAC name. By their nature the membership
of Commissions changes regularly and a mechanism needed to be found
to ensure all work invested into developing electronic information had
a lifetime well beyond the limited tenure of particular individuals
in the commissions.
A further concern was the lack of guidance for commission members on
how to implement use of the world wide web to improve efficiency within
the commissions.
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WWW.IUPAC.ORG
Location
The IUPAC Secretariat at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA,
maintains the 'official' IUPAC site on the World Wide Web (WWW). This
is located on a very high speed server system linked to the Internet
by a high speed high bandwidth professional network with 24 hour a day
availability.
Content
- All 'public' information made available by IUPAC bodies should be
mounted on this web site.
- Individual groups may wish to mirror their contribution on their group's
own web sites.
- Recommendations, technical reports and journal articles from IUPAC
bodies will be available through the official web site. These documents
will initially be available in Portable Document Format (PDF) [ ref.
on the Adobe Protable Document Format, see <http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/adobepdf.html>
] to ensure no loss of format on distribution. Compatibility with the
printed version of a document cannot currently be ensured by using the
simple Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) encoding implemented in the
current generation of Internet browsers. It is also not possible to
maintain formatting if the original word processing files are distributed
as these will reformat a document depending on the local computer hardware
(incl. printers) and software (operating system, word processor version,
installed fonts, etc.)
- Other information of a more transient nature such as commission or
working party drafts will be made available in the most appropriate
format depending on content. It is important to build in a formal hurdle
to receiving preliminary or provisional information. Currently a request
for the information needs to be made and distribution is controlled.
This practice should continue in electronic form.
- Numerical data, which is produced by some commissions in large quantities,
will also be made available through the web site but the most appropriate
method will be decided in consultation with the various IUPAC bodies
and may well vary depending on data type.
- An agreement with the IUPAC publishers will allow archiving of all
IUPAC publications in SGML format [ ref. on publishing
in Standard Generalized Markup Language 'SGML' see <http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/sgml-xml.html>
] at the Secretariat to enable the Union to react to future developments
in Internet browser technology. SGML is an ISO standard for content
markup in electronic documentation and HTML is a very limited subset
of this standard.
Electronic Publication
Pure and Applied
Chemistry
In the immediate future Pure and Applied Chemistry will be available
in electronic form via the IUPAC home page. Technical details of the
mode of access remain to be ironed out.
Chemistry International
The content of Chemistry International is usually of a more administrative
or informative nature for people working within the Union as well as
the world chemical community. As such it lends itself more to presentation
on the Internet and is now available online at: http://www.iupac.org/publications/ci/
Other Publications
Other IUPAC publications such as the various color books will be made
available in electronic form via the IUPAC web site at various times
following the release of the printed form. The exact timing of the release
of the electronic version and the method of distribution will vary depending
on the source of the publication, the content, and individual publishing
agreements.
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