The Journal receives a large number of submissions of laboratory experiments, and we view the broad range of experiments readers can find each month as one of our most important features. Beginning in 1997 the Journal will handle submission, review, and publication of laboratory experiments in a different way.

The new policies are based on four fundamental ideas:

· readers who decide to use a lab should be able to adapt it to their circumstances quickly and easily

· peer review of submitted labs should be based to a large degree on the written and technology-based materials used by students in the laboratory

· the Journal should print only the information a reader needs in order to decide whether to try to use the experiment

· more detailed information, including student materials, should be available to adopters of an experiment in a format that is modifiable and easily adapted for use by students and support staff

Lab Summaries in JCE

To achieve these goals, all papers reporting new experiments for teaching laboratories must be written as Lab Summaries. These should be no longer than one Journal page and will be limited to the information that prospective adopters must have in order to evaluate how well a lab would suit their programs. Lab Summaries will include the kinds of information listed in the box at the top of the previous page.

Peer review of laboratory experiments will be based on more than just the Lab Summary. Submissions of laboratory experiments to the Journal must also include the written materials to be used by students, instructor notes, and other supplementary information that is essential to someone who will be adapting the lab to a new program. A summary of what should be submitted is in the box headed Lab Documentation on the facing page. A decision to publish will be based on reviewers' evaluation of all the materials submitted.

Those who plan to submit a lab should first search the Annotated List of Laboratory Experiments to make certain that a very similar experiment has not already appeared in the Journal. This keyworded, computer-searchable database was compiled by Stanley Bunce, James Zubrick, and members of the Division of Chemical Education Committee on Project ChemLab. It is currently available for IBM PC from Project SERAPHIM for downloading at http://ice.chem.wisc.edu/SERAPHIM/PC_Files/PC2001.zip . The Journal's annual and decennial indexes and the computerized index available at JCE: Online (http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/journal/search/index.html) should also be searched before a submission is made.

Lab Documentation on JCE: Online

For those labs recommended for publication as a result of peer review, the Lab Summary will be published in the print Journal. In addition the summary and all other supporting material will be published via JCE: Online as Lab Documentation. This includes everything listed in the box on the facing page. All Lab Documentation will be placed on the Web as computer files that can be edited by those who adopt a lab, provided they have the same software that the author used to create the documentation. In practice we expect that most written material will be in either Microsoft Word or Word Perfect format. Once a manuscript has been accepted, the author will be asked to supply computer-readable versions of all materials.

Those without Web access can request printed copies of all materials related to a particular experiment. We will provide these via U.S. Postal Service at cost.

Why Change?

We believe that this new system has several advantages for Journal readers. It will be easier to scan through all experiments in a given issue and decide whether an experiment is likely to be suitable. If a reader wants more detailed information, it will be available 24 hours a day via JCE: Online. Computer-readable files for all published experiments will be available for downloading from the Internet, and these files can be easily changed to suit local tastes and needs. By printing fewer pages of lab experiments, the Journal will save printing costs, postponing the necessity of increasing subscription rates.

There are also advantages for authors. The process of preparing a manuscript will be simpler, because most of the material to be submitted will already have been written and used with students, teaching assistants or other instructors, or lab technicians. An author's major tasks will be to write the Lab Summary and collect and organize the other materials. It will not be necessary to rewrite the experimental procedure or any other part of the lab into the format of a research report. It will, of course, be necessary to provide computer-readable versions of everything, once a manuscript has been accepted for publication.

Summary

We hope that this new policy regarding laboratory experiments will make the Journal even more useful and attractive to readers. The division between print and electronic media will be:

· what appears in print should provide enough information for a reader to decide whether or not it would be worthwhile to download the Lab Documentation from JCE:Online

· what is placed on JCE:Online will be much more extensive and directly usable with students because its computer-readable format will be easy to adapt to local circumstances

As usual, we are interested in feedback from readers and authors about this or any other policy. Let us hear from you.