With advances in publishing technologies come new job titles. On the Sceptical Chymist blog's popular question-and-answer series 'Reactions', Laura Croft, technical editor for Nature Chemistry and Nature Chemical Biology, describes her own role (http://tinyurl.com/yb5vvyg).

Technical editors, she says, are in charge of “adding extra features to research articles on our website. We are incorporating extra compound information pages, which are linked from bold compound numbers in the HTML and PDF of our articles, as well as highlighting chemical names in the text and linking these to free chemical databases.” She hopes her efforts will eventually change the way scientists use and retrieve information online.

The interview also touches on Croft's interest in the chemistry of pigments and photographic techniques, and how she would have liked to have eaten dinner with William Perkin, the English chemist who discovered a purple dye in 1856, aged just 18. She thinks Reactions should interview Stuart Warren, a co-author of “the big green book”, the textbook from which she learned most of her organic chemistry.