To cite this article please refer to the printed edition of TrAC: Trends Anal. Chem. 14 (1995) 240
The explosive growth of the global information system known as the World-Wide Web has in just a few years impacted on many areas of science. One of the more interesting,unusual and perhaps even slightly controversial areas relates to the organisation of and participation in electronic conferences.
As with many other areas related to information dissemination such as journals and books, conferences are becoming both more plentiful and yet increasingly expensive to participate in. Whereas the costs of printed materials are not exclusively borne by the end user, financing a conference trip is often out of the question for students, and even well endowed researchers struggle to attend more than one or two events each year, because of both financial and of time restrictions. Frustratingly, even if attendance at an event is possible, the trend is to make it impossible to attend more than about a quarter of the talks given, because of the parallel session nature of many modern conferences. It has to be said that the quality of presentations may also bear no resemblance to the quality of the abstract presented beforehand. Because of time pressure, keynote speakers increasingly attend only the day they are scheduled to speak, and finding them in the bar can be a hit and miss affair. At a recent occasion I attended with 1300 other participants, one star speaker was booked into a remote hotel, partially in response to the crowd of people who were expected to want to meet him.
Two "electronic" solutions to some of these problems have been tried recently. One is to have parallel electronic material available well before the conference starts, and to equip the venue with a large number of "computer screens" where people can try to keep abreast of events. At one such conference, I was able to send nightly conference reports by e-mail to colleagues unable to attend, including so called "Uniform Resource locators" to interesting talks, prior to retiring to the bar with new-found acquaintances. The other solution is the rather more leisurely "virtual conference", of which two of note in the chemical area were organised during 1994 [1]. These are sufficiently different in character from "physical" conferences that it really is somewhat inappropriate to directly compare them. Most obviously, the opportunity to meet people and discuss your subject with them appears lacking, but even this need not be the disadvantage it appears. Nevertheless, as a complementary model to the current conference mode, the electronic gathering has several distinct advantages that are worth a closer inspection.
Virtual electronic conferences are based quite closely on the way that Faraday Symposia of the Royal Society of Chemistry are organised, where the emphasis is on the discussion of presented papers, with the actual presentation itself being made available beforehand. For example, the Electronic Computational Chemistry conference [2] had abstracts and subsequently full papers or posters submitted and scrutinised by a scientific panel following the "Faraday" model. All participants could then read the papers at their leisure, and submit comments if they wished on any paper. All participants would receive these comments and could chose to reply to them or simply to "lurk", using Internet parlance. Because these contributions were by and large composed at people's leisure, the adversarial approach sometimes found at conferences was less prominent. More importantly, people had the time to include full citations to supporting work, and to "check their facts" in their local libary or textbook. These and many other aspects of this conference have been analysed by Bachrach [3].
Can the electronic conference go beyond the "Faraday" model? A conference being organised for June 1995 known as ECTOC, or "Electronic conference on Trends in Organic Chemistry" [4] is planned to introduce several features that have no simple equivalent with physical conferences (Figure). Firstly, this conference will be fully indexed, using a "fuzzy" search algorithm. In theory at least, finding all papers that cite a particular method, or perhaps a particular author, should be quite trivial. It is very rare to find printed conference abstracts so indexed. In future, the indexing will increase greatly in sophistication, as for example where chemical content will be directly searched for say a molecular sub-structure or for instrumental information. Another future trend will be "harvesting", or highly selective wide area cross-indexing of a conference with similar collections of data contained elsewhere on the Internet.
Authors are also being encouraged to submit supplemental information for their posters or papers in what has been called "hyperactive" form [5,6]. For example, if a new structure is reported which has been verified by x-ray crystallography, the original molecular coordinates can be readily acquired by conference participants by simply clicking on a relevant hyperlink or "thumbnail" image of the molecule. In another novel departure, a facility to submit molecular data to a conference "hyperglossary" is being made available. Thus participants could have the opportunity to create an on-the-fly database of information as discussion proceeds [7]. In the background, programs will operate that will check the validity of the data submitted, ensuring that the data made available to participants has gone through at least some form of quality assurance. In this, we are closer to the ethos of a workshop, where practical experience can be shared amongst participants. Although the emphasis is expected to be on structural coordinates to facilitate stereochemical discussions, other types of information such as spectral data are readily assimilated into this formalism. This emphasis on the distribution of semantically rich data is extended not only to authors of papers but to e-mail participants via a concept known as "chemmail". Such an extension to the conventional text-based electronic mail messages allows enclosures of structural and other chemical data using a protocol known as chemical MIME [8]. The discussions will be structured using a program known as Hypermail, also used with the ECCC conference [3], but extended to recognise any chemical enclosures in the messages.
In essence, the hitherto obvious distinctions between a book, a journal, a conference talk and discussion, a research seminar [9], a workshop and a personal database or modelling session in one's own laboratory or office are significantly blurred by the above type of event. Undoubtedly, the cost of both organising and participating in an electronic conference is very substantially lower than that involved in travel and accommodation. But does it promote collaboration and cross-fertilisation in science to the same degree? I would argue it most certainly can do! The opportunity to visit all "parallel" sessions at a conference means that decisions on which talk to attend need not be made. Experience has shown that the e-mail discussions during an electronic conference can serve to induce new collaborations, resulting in subsequent "physical" meetings in the form of invited talks or conference meetings. Otherwise disenfranchised students and others unable to travel can participate fully in proceedings. Perhaps most importantly, the conference can serve as a distribution and reference point for precise digital information. New algorithms or mathematical functions, program codes, raw instrumental data, molecular coordinates, highly annotated or processed data and a myriad of new forms of rich content can be associated with presentations, allowing others to apply this to their own needs without the risk of corruption. In theory at least, the quality of scientific exchange can be vastly improved compared with a reliance on half-remembered lecture slides or notes written in the margins of conference abstracts. And finally, one should note the timescale that an electronic conference can operate on. Received papers can be mounted within one day of receipt, including full refereeing using a combination of e-mail and on-line inspection. Supplemental data is available immediately, rather than the two year wait sometimes necessary for say molecular coordinates to become available. Perhaps four or five exchanges of e-mail can occur within a 24 hour period on any particular "thread" which develops. The only step which is currently still relatively slow is the consolidation of an electronic conference into CD-ROM based proceedings, which still takes of the order of months rather than hours or days.
Not too far into the future, chemistry electronic conferences will be tightly integrated into electronic journals, books, teaching materials, databases, instrumental resources, e-mail discussions, videoconferencing and molecular whiteboarding. In a sense, we need a new term for the whole entity. The description "Chemical Collaboratory" has been used [10,11]. It certainly emphasises that human interactions need not be lost in this new virtual world, and that travel agents might even find an increase rather than a decrease in their business!
Figure 1. The Home Page of the ECTOC Electronic Chemistry Conference.
[1] J. H. Krieger and D. L. Illman, Chem. & Eng. News, December 12, (1994) 29.
[2] "Proceedings of the First Electronic Computational Chemistry Conference", Eds. S. M. Bachrach, D. B. Boyd, S. K. Gray, W. Hase, H. S. Rzepa, ARInternet: Landover, Nov. 7- Dec. 2, 1994, in press.
[3] S.M. Bachrach, J. Chem. Inf. Comp. Sci., 1995, in press.
[4] First Electronic Conference on Trends in Organic Chemistry, Eds. H. S. Rzepa and J. M. Goodman, June 12-23, 1995. See also http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/ectoc/
[5] H.S. Rzepa, B. J. Whitaker and M. J. Winter, J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Commun., (1994) 1907.
[6]O. Casher, G.Chandramohan, M. Hargreaves, P. Murray-Rust, R. Sayle, H. S. Rzepa and B. J. Whitaker, J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans 2 (1995) 7.
[7]This concept was introduced with the VSNS-PPS Course on "Principles of Protein Structure", December 1994., Eds A. Mills and P. Murray-Rust. See the URL http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS/index.html
[8] H. S. Rzepa, P. Murray-Rust and B. J. Whitaker, IETF Internet Draft, March-August, 1995. See http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemime2.html
[9] See for example H. S. Rzepa, "Hyperactive Chemistry" presented at Liverpool University, March 7, 1995. See also http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/talks/
[10] O. Casher and H. S. Rzepa, Comp. Graphics, May (1995).
[11] O. Casher and H. S. Rzepa, "Chemical Collaboratories", Proceedings of the American Chemical Society Meeting, Anaheim, April 2-7, 1995.
© Elsevier Science 1995
