Around 1996, journals started publishing what became known as “ESI” or electronic supporting information, alongside the articles themselves, as a mechanism for exposing the data associated with the research being reported and exploiting some of the new opportunities offered by the World Wide Web. From the outset, such ESI was expressed as a paginated Acrobat file, with the Web being merely a convenient document delivery mechanism.
In 2006[1] we published an article illustrating various types of pseudorotations in small molecules. It’s been cited 20 times since then, so reasonable interest! We described rotations known as Lever and Turnstile as well as the better known Berry mode. Because the differences between these rotations are quite subtle, we included an interactive electronic supporting information to illustrate them.
A previous post was triggered by Peter alerting me that interactive electronic supporting information ( <strong> IESI </strong> ) we had submitted to a journal in 2005[1] appeared to be strangely missing from the article landing page. This set me off recollecting our journey, which had started around 1998, and to explore what the current state of these ancient <strong> IESI </strong> s were in 2022.
The science journal is generally acknowledged as first appearing around 1665 with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London and (simultaneously) the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. By the turn of the millennium, around 10,000 science and medical journals were estimated to exist.
As the Internet and its Web-components age, so early pages start to decay as technology moves on. A few posts ago, I talked about the maintenance of a relatively simple page first hosted some 21 years ago. In my notes on the curation, I wrote the phrase “ Less successful was the attempt to include buttons which could be used to annotate the structures with highlights.