The IYC 2011 Virtual Colloquium was the first ConfChem to use taxonomies to organize the web pages and several new features were added to the papers. Several authors embedded YouTube videos and a couple took advantage of the opportunity to remotely record PowerPoint presentations using the open source BigBlueButton conference management system9 and Bandicam recording software.10 These were global projects, where for example Bob Belford in the USA recorded Javier Garcia Martinez’s online presentation from Spain, which was embedded in paper 3, “The Global Experiment of the International Year of Chemistry: Creating Online Communities for Education and Science.” Likewise, Jim McQuillan in New Zealand presented a slide show on paper 9 “Chemistry Cartoon Competition: An IYC Activity from Physical Science in IUPAC.” In paper 7, “Visualizing and Understanding the Science of Climate Change” we were able to embed one of the applets from the King’s Centre for Visualization in the Science.
Other reasons for the underutilization of online conferences by chemistry communities may be because of the role of scientific societies, peer review, and the current practice of science. Traditional publishing has evolved out of Gutenberg Era technologies and resulted in a “filter then publish model,” with scientific societies providing the filtering through the journal review process. Instead, online publications like ConfChem follow a “publish then filter” model, where the discussions amount to a different type of filtering of the content.11 The consequence is that ConfChem–type publications are not considered to have been peer reviewed, reducing their value to authors in academia with respect to issues like tenure and promotion. Furthermore, some publishers still consider a ConfChem publication as prior publishing, which could prevent the work from being published in a peer-reviewed journal; this factor alone would steer potential authors of scientific works away from online conferences.
The CCCE recognized these issues and came to an arrangement with the Journal of Chemical Education to create a feature that took advantage of both of these filtering processes, whereby authors of ConfChem papers could submit communications on their ConfChem papers to JCE for peer review, with both the original online paper and discussions attached as supporting information. The journal would then publish the bundled communications in an edition of the printed journal and archive the original ConfChem papers and discussions as supporting information. The net result is a series of published communications on the topic of the ConfChem that benefited from the online discussions. The Spring 2010 ConfChem, “Educating the Next Generation: Green and Sustainable Chemistry,” was the first to be published in JCE. This framework of integrating an online conference into a printed journal could be adapted to other areas of chemistry outside of education, and potentially provide higher-quality publications. The series of communications resulting from the Spring 2012 ConfChem will also appear in JCE.