Re:other commentary options, I was thinking of how the new media is able to operate. If you print a paper, additional commentary becomes impossible without reprinting. As we get more and more information electronically, it does become possible to “reprint” and thus comments or corrections could be made.

@Mitch, I think I had encountered the http://www.chemfeeds.com, but I had forgotten. None the less, I always find it difficult to be aware or to spend the time to search for comments on any reaction. Even for simple typographical errors that are published a few issues later, they can easily be missed.

In grad school, one of the cumulative exams was to review a paper from a peer reviewed journal. No one passed this cum. The essence of the review was to read the data and to determine independently whether the authors interpreted the data correctly (they hadn’t). Later in my industrial career, I encountered an erroneous structural interpretation. Since I was working in that area, I had the resources to write a paper proving the correct structure. However, in doing so, the editor of the originating journal did not deem my paper worthy of their journal and when I did find another journal to publish, I was subjected to a much higher standard of proof than the original authors. Thus, I argue a fairly high barrier to printed commentary exists in printed journals and I doubt a correction of the paper in the cum was ever made.

Here, I agree with Verpa, that the ACS at some time in the future, should include commentary. This does trigger a different thought. If browsers or a reader script had a plugin to find chemfeeds, then something closer to what I was asking about would result. Perhaps the commentary would evolve its own guidelines.

Phil Baran at Scripps even notes on his publications page that they cannot provide the manuscript online due to copyright restrictions. However, other Scripps professors do provide direct links to PDFs.

http://www.scripps.edu/chem/baran/html/publications.html

10 years from now ACS will think it always gave authors the right to host their own papers and will be confused why people thought they couldn’t.

@Mitch: Like you said before “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” or, to how difficult would it be, the great open source answer, ‘Not very, if you help.’

Though, in seriousness, as someone who has thought about this stuff more than most, how would one go about trying to sway the ACS? Facebook group them? A bombard of tweets? A thread in the non-existant JACS forum? A well written letter to the editor?

First we have to do what you’re doing and build the tools to change things.

I got a stern talking to on this issue a while back…unless things have changed and I’m misreading the JACS policy:

http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/learning_module/module.html#twenty4
“# May I post papers I have authored on my Web site, even though ACS holds copyright?
Only the title, abstract, and graphical material may be used without further permission of the ACS. You may provide a link to the paper using the Digital Object Identifier link (see Q. 26 below).”

“# Suppose I download a PDF file of an article from the ACS Web site in accord with permission listed on the site. May I then email that file to a colleague, or post it on a file server for my students/colleagues?
As a general rule, copying and distributing electronic material (be it a PDF file or other type of data file) that is protected by copyright is limited to the same extent that photocopying the article would be. Given the extensive use of institutional licensing for ACS materials, your colleagues can often access the same material, and giving them the appropriate journal reference is as easy (and accomplishes the same end) as giving them the file itself.”

I agree that things should work the way you suggest … I wish science in general was still a gentleman’s sport.

If the point is to have access to the literature then authors should put their papers on their group websites. Hosting your own paper I hope falls within established copyright law and that way there isn’t any major publisher upheaval; everyone is happy, and chemists can go about their business. It would be an odd day indeed if you emailed the author of a paper for access to it and they didn’t send a copy to you. That being said I do have a paper in Nature Chemistry that I don’t have access to, as Berkeley doesn’t subscribe, and that is an odd experience.