Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 263 No 7063 p414-415
September 18, 1999 The Society

PJOnline — the electronic Pharmaceutical Journal

Real planning for PJOnline began early in 1998. By that time, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society already had a website (www.rpsgb.org.uk) and five to six main items were being abstracted from The Journal each week and placed on it. Because this was the Society's site, it was not under the control of the Editor of the PJ and any items to be placed there were subject to the approval of the Society's Secretary and Registrar. Many items were shortened versions of what appeared in the PJ.
This was not an ideal arrangement from the point of view of either the Society or The Journal, although it had its advantages for both. The positive aspects of the arrangement were that the Society's site provided The Journal with a foothold in the electronic publishing arena and that the Society got a more attractive website than would otherwise have been the case. On the negative side, the news content of the Society's site was reports abstracted from the PJ rather than Society news per se and it did not provide rapid access to the rest of The Journal's content. Some members of The Journal's editorial staff had been suggesting for some time that an internet version should be produced. The first substantive meeting to discuss the realities of making The Journal available on the internet took place on January 29, 1998, attended by the editor of The Journal (Mr Douglas Simpson), the advertisement manager (Mr Jack Richmond), the Society's publications director (Mr Charles Fry) and the Society's website controller (Mrs Mary Snell). The outcome was an outline plan to produce a cut-down version of The Journal on-line and to launch it at the British Pharmaceutical Conference in 1998. As became evident, that seriously underestimated the magnitude of the task if it was to be done properly.
The next step was to commission a consultant (Clive Hemingway, Connected Publications) to report on the technicalities of launching a website for a weekly publication and to guide us through the process.
Members of The Journal's editorial, advertising and publishing staff, along with Mr Hemingway then began to browse the websites of other publications and organisations with a view to identifying the "look and feel" that was appropriate for the profession's journal. The outcome was a design brief to be circulated to web designers so that they could produce sufficiently substantive design propositions to allow one of them to be commissioned to take the job through to completion.
The designers were then asked to present their proposals to the group of editorial and publishing staff that was leading the website's development. Three designers made presentations, but none of them were felt at that time to have sufficiently captured the ethos of The Pharmaceutical Journal to be given the job. After a further two designers failed to win the contract it was decided to go back to one of the first three and try to tease out what we wanted to see. Eventually, the design job was awarded to that company (Binary Vision).
Many other decisions needed to be made at the same time as all this was going on. Two of them were how the website was to be hosted and what should be its web address (domain name).
The options for hosting (where the computer that actually holds all the electronic data would be located) were fourfold: a commercial third party; an academic third party; in-house; or the system supplier. Each has its advantages and disadvantages in relation to reliability, availability of support staff, linespeed/bandwidth and cost. A leading commercial host in Britain is Uunet, which is also the gatekeeper for commercial links to the country's internet backbone. This closeness to the nation's internet backbone makes Uunet a fast connection for internet traffic and was one of a number of reasons why the company was selected as the host for PJOnline.
So far as domain naming was concerned pjonline.com was not available as that address was already owned by the Petticoat Junction situation comedy that had been running on American television since 1964. Apart from that, PJ is a somewhat colloquial abbreviation used for The Pharmaceutical Journal in Great Britain, but which is not necessarily recognised overseas. The Journal already owned the domain name pharmj.org.uk for e-mail purposes, pharmj having been selected because "Pharm J" is internationally recognised in biomedical and scientific publishing as the abbreviation for The Pharmaceutical Journal. Hence "pharmj.com" was the obvious domain name of choice for the website. It also had the advantage of being available.
Of major importance to any publishing website is the choice of indexing and retrieval software. Without this, PJOnline users would not be able to search the PJ's content. PJOnline uses Muscat Empower, which is also deployed on such publications as the Electronic Telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk) and Hansard (www.parliament.uk).
One of the final steps necessary before PJOnline could be launched was to recruit a full-time website controller to extract the full content of The Journal from its publishing software files, recoding it so that it can be viewed on the internet, uploading it to the host computer and developing the website generally. At the beginning of August, Miss Nada Savitch joined The Journal's staff to take on this task. Since then, she has been busy ensuring that The Journal's online archive of material reached back to the August 7 issue so that the online edition could be launched with content already available.

Michael Thompson is an assistant editor of The Pharmaceutical Journal