More on rescuing articles from a now defunct early pioneering example of an Internet journal.

Two years ago, I posted on the topic “Internet Archeology: reviving a 2001 article published in the Internet Journal of Chemistry (IJC)”.[1] The IJC had been founded in 1998,[2]  in part at least to “re-invent” the scholarly journal by elevating research data to being a more integrated part of the overall article, rather than as the previously conventional addendum of SI (Supporting Information)^‡. IJC was in one sense following on from an earlier such project dating from 1995[3] by taking it to the next level. Sadly, the pioneering IJC journal had gone off-line in 2004 and the content for around 100 articles was thought lost. It happened that I still retained the original source and associated data for one article of mine and my post[1] described how I managed to get it back into more or less full working order. Now Egon Willighagen[4] has cleverly found a way of rescuing many more of these lost articles, thanks to various Web-based infrastructures:

1. From 1996 as the Internet archive (using a query such as https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ijc.com/abstracts/*),
2. From 2012, WikiData (see https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q27211732)
3. Also from 2012, ORCID (Resarcher and collaborator) profiles. Some reserchers had the foresight (alas not me) to link their by then defunct IJC articles to their new ORCID profiles.

I link here to some examples of rescued articles as shown on Egon’s blog. I eagerly look forward to seeing what else is to come using such tools!

^‡ By around 2005, a clearer separation between the journal (the “story” or research narrative) and its associated research data was being seen as the way forward, with the data now being placed in a data repository (or Wikidata) separate from the journal, with added descriptive metadata to help make it a stand-alone object and this new entity to now be cited in the journal article (and bidirectionally the article from the data) using a persistent identifier – initially as a Handle, then as a DOI.[5] FAIR data as a concept had started to emerge from these developments, being formalised around a decade later in 2016.[6]

This post has DOI:10.59350/rzepa.29523

References

1. H. Rzepa, “Internet Archeology: reviving a 2001 article published in the Internet Journal of Chemistry.”, 2024.
2. S.M. Bachrach, and S.R. Heller, “TheInternet Journal of Chemistry:A Case Study of an Electronic Chemistry Journal”, Serials Review, vol. 26, pp. 3-14, 2000.
3. D. James, B.J. Whitaker, C. Hildyard, H.S. Rzepa, O. Casher, J.M. Goodman, D. Riddick, and P. Murray‐Rust, “The case for content integrity in electronic chemistry journals: The CLIC project”, New Review of Information Networking, vol. 1, pp. 61-69, 1995.
4. E. Willighagen, “The Internet Journal of Chemistry”, 2025.
5. J. Downing, P. Murray-Rust, A.P. Tonge, P. Morgan, H.S. Rzepa, F. Cotterill, N. Day, and M.J. Harvey, “SPECTRa: The Deposition and Validation of Primary Chemistry Research Data in Digital Repositories”, Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, vol. 48, pp. 1571-1581, 2008.
6. M.D. Wilkinson, M. Dumontier, I.J. Aalbersberg, G. Appleton, M. Axton, A. Baak, N. Blomberg, J. Boiten, L.B. da Silva Santos, P.E. Bourne, J. Bouwman, A.J. Brookes, T. Clark, M. Crosas, I. Dillo, O. Dumon, S. Edmunds, C.T. Evelo, R. Finkers, A. Gonzalez-Beltran, A.J. Gray, P. Groth, C. Goble, J.S. Grethe, J. Heringa, P.A. ’t Hoen, R. Hooft, T. Kuhn, R. Kok, J. Kok, S.J. Lusher, M.E. Martone, A. Mons, A.L. Packer, B. Persson, P. Rocca-Serra, M. Roos, R. van Schaik, S. Sansone, E. Schultes, T. Sengstag, T. Slater, G. Strawn, M.A. Swertz, M. Thompson, J. van der Lei, E. van Mulligen, J. Velterop, A. Waagmeester, P. Wittenburg, K. Wolstencroft, J. Zhao, and B. Mons, “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship”, Scientific Data, vol. 3, 2016.