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At the Council meeting held during the 2019 World Chemistry Congress in Paris, a representative from one of IUPAC’s National Adhering Organizations raised the question “What is Blockchain Technology?” They went on to say that both “Blockchain” and “Artificial Intelligence” were prominent buzzwords and asked if IUPAC could provide information on how these technologies were impacting science in general and chemistry in particular. Coincidentally, at that same Congress, the technology had been the subject of a presentation by Richard Shute [1], one of the authors of this paper, and the technology had already captured the interest of Bonnie Lawlor, another of the authors of this paper, to the extent that she published an article in Chemistry International (CI)on the topic the following year [2]. As a result of the question raised at the Council meeting, Javier García-Martínez, IUPAC President 2022-2023, suggested that a white paper on Blockchain be developed (Note: Artificial Intelligence was made the focus of the global, virtual 2021 World Chemistry Leadership Meeting (WCLM) and a brief article on that special event was published in the July 2022 issue of CI [3]).

The article discusses the highlights of the National Federation of Advanced Information Services' conference "In Search of Answers: Unlocking New Value From Content," held from February 24-26, 2013 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The event was aimed to highlight examples of how the application of technologies like data mining, linking, analytics, and metrics can expose, enhance, and create new information and insights from available data. Information is provided on presentations at the event.

The article presents best practices and recommendations for publishing journal articles introduced by the Journal Articles Working Group of the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS). Best practices recommendations include affirmation of the journal, article retrieval, and version management. It notes that maintaining a flow of high-quality scientific information would provide a competitive advantage in the U.S.

The article presents letters to the editor on matters related to the online information services industry in the U.S. One of the readers comments on an article on disc vs. disk. The other reader suggests the name of Delores Meglio, senior vice president and publisher with Information Access Co., as a suitable candidate for the post of electronic database publisher and advertiser. Another reader indicates that the statement in which West Publishing had acquired all rights to the Wang/West Premise product is inaccurate. Data Information Services Inc. of Nashua N.H. had acquired similar rights in 1990. The companies Wang, West and Mead dynamics during the development of Premise were second to none. Mead and West were in heavy litigation, the time in reference to legal information rights at the state level. West was a co-developer, Mead was their major competitor, but Mead was willing to sign on to use the technology. This technology with out a doubt would have been the defector standard for legal information if Wang had not backed out at the last minute.