JCE Internet Is a Distributed Publication

One of the features of World Wide Web is the ability to easily link documents together. This linking extends to documents that can reside on separate servers located anywhere on the Internet. An Internet publication is no longer confined to a single physical entity as is a paper journal or book. JCE Internet takes advantage of this feature by offering distributed resources. One such resource is the Chemistry Education Resource Shelf (http://www.umsl.edu/~chemist/books/) edited by Hal Harris and residing on a server at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. This information is printed in the form of the Journal's Book Buyers Guide. This online version is kept up to date with the latest information and provides links to reviews published in this Journal and to publishers' WWW sites. The Chemistry Education Resource Shelf now gives you the ability to search its information by title, author, or publisher. The Chemistry Education Resource Shelf is the place to go if you are looking for information on chemistry textbooks and software.

An End to Hit-and-Miss WWW Surfing

The WWW is a daunting world of information where finding what you are looking for may seem an impossible task. To help chemistry educators find useful information, JCE Internet has a listed of reviewed WWW sites. These sites have been reviewed by our WWW Site Review Committee chaired by David Shaw. Only those sites that pass the review of this committee are listed. As I write this we have just posted the latest additions to the list. If you have or know of a WWW site that you would like to have reviewed by our committee, you can send email including the URL of the site to dbshaw@facstaff.wisc.edu.

Digital Articles

Of course, distribution via the Internet means that all the information is digital in nature. The articles published by JCE Internet depend upon the digital medium to allow the incorporation of animation, video, interactivity, and other digital documents. Such articles go beyond the limits of the print medium in their ability to portray chemical phenomena using motion or interactivity.

When JCE Internet publishes a new article its abstract will appear in this column. We are pleased to publish our first abstract, Animated Vibrational Modes of Triatomic Particles, by Giles Henderson and Christine Liberatore. Here the use of embedded animation allows the reader to see the motion that results from the normal modes along with the composite motion produced by those modes. Without the embedded animation, this article would be diminished greatly. This is the kind of article that JCE Internet publishes; one that cannot be done in the print medium.

For Your Reviewing Pleasure

JCE Internet has an open review policy that gives everyone the opportunity to review and comment on articles before they are published. It is our hope that open review will give our authors more feedback on their submissions than they would get using the standard review procedure and that this added feedback will result in better articles. It also gives our readership more input into what is published.

JCE Internet currently has three articles in open review. Scott Van Bramer has submitted two articles on Using Mathcad To Teach Instrumental Techniques and Interpreted NMR Data. William F. Coleman has submitted an article that incorporates Excel spreadsheets called The Interactive SpreadsheetTaking "What If" out of the Classroom and Putting It in the Students' Hands. Please take a look at these offerings and submit your reviews. You can email your review comments to jcereviews@chem.wisc.edu. We eagerly anticipate your comments. To help you with your review, we have set up an area of JCE Internet with information for reviewers at http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCEWWW/Reviewers/Guide.html.

Feature Columns

We are working to bring more feature columns to JCE Internet. Several are in the planning stages. The next one to appear is on the Use of Mathcad in the Chemistry Curriculum, edited by Theresa Zielinski. Theresa will be telling you more about her feature on these pages in an upcoming issue. Stay tuned for news of other columns as they are ready.

If you have any ideas for a JCE Internet feature and would like to volunteer to become a feature editor to see those ideas bear fruit, we would like to hear from you. Submit your ideas via email to jceonline@chem.wisc.edu.

Call For Submissions

If you have written an article or developed a resource that you think is suitable for publication by JCE Internet, we would like to hear from you also. Information on and guidelines for submitting articles to JCE Internet is available from http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCEWWW/Authors/. As is the policy of JCE Software, we are willing to help you bring your works in progress to publication.

Authors will be happy to learn that JCE Internet strives to process their submission using electronic forms of communication whenever possible. The only exception is one form on which we need to have a written signature. All other forms are transmitted via email and email attachments. We think that you will find this system of submission processing more efficient and more suited to life in the digital age.

JCE Online+ Subscribers Only

The entire contents of JCE Internet is now available to everyone, but this is going to change. Several resources including all new articles, articles in open review, and feature columns will soon be restricted to JCE Online+ subscribers. (By now you all should know about JCE Online+. If you do not, visit http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/Plus/ for more information.)

JCE Online and
JCE Online+

Point your favorite browser to
http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/

Bookmark it!