Since 1992 the World Wide Web has radically changed the way that we live and work. For most of us, living without the Internet would be like living without water or electricity. As research has become increasingly collaborative, possibilities for communication and collaboration on the Web have also increased. Virtual communities in science such as EiVillage and BioMedNet began to spring up in the 1990s. The earliest virtual community in chemistry, ChemWeb.com, was announced in August 1996 and launched in April 1997. At its peak it offered access to books, journals and databases, and member-generated content, together with discussion groups, virtual conferences and a chemistry preprint server. Eventually its owners started to lose interest; if only they had known what would follow with the advent of Web 2.0 in 2004. The world has since moved on from �e-everything� (e-mail, e-journals, e-commerce) to mobile technologies and �i-everything�, and experimentation in publishing has moved on too. An example is ScienceOpen, an open access scholarly publisher with a new network-based approach, and the mantra �access, network, organize, publish�. It was launched at the end of 2013 with more than one million freely accessible papers in multiple disciplines. It offers authors tools to collect feedback in one place, manage draft versions and share files, to make collaborating on a paper together easy. Its scientific network forms the basis for public, post-publication peer review. ChemWeb.com was ahead of its time. Is the chemistry world now ready for new ventures such as ScienceOpen? In the world of open access, open data and open science what might happen next?

From virtual communities to Web 2.0, social media, and beyond: A publishing perspective

248th National Meeting (2014)

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