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)”.[cite]10.59350/xqerh-wam97[/cite] The IJC had been founded in 1998,[cite]10.1080/00987913.2000.10764578[/cite]  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[cite]10.1080/13614579509516846[/cite] 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[cite]10.59350/xqerh-wam97[/cite] described how I managed to get it back into more or less full working order. Now Egon Willighagen[cite]https://doi.org/10.59350/2ss5b-jpr33[/cite] 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.[cite]10.1021/ci7004737[/cite] FAIR data as a concept had started to emerge from these developments, being formalised around a decade later in 2016.[cite]10.1038/sdata.2016.18[/cite]

This post has DOI:10.59350/rzepa.29523