[1] According to the forum's web site, it is estimated that more than 3000 members in more than 50 countries are reading CCL messages regularly, and the discussions cover all aspects of computational chemistry.
It was formed in 1991 by initiative of Jan Labanowski, at the time a computational chemistry specialist in the Ohio Supercomputing Center, as a mailing list for the hundred persons who had participated in a workshop he had organized together with one of the founding fathers of the field, Charles Bender.
The purpose of the list as first created was to continue the lively discussions and encounters that had taken place in the workshop and help grow the field which was accelerating due to the recent availability of maturing quantum, classical and semi-empirical methods, of supercomputers and their power, of personal computers and their flexibility and interoperability, of promising software packages bound to occupy a market niche in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.
[1] The CCL is thus a typical scholar mailing list of its time as many other flourished in the eighties and nineties in various scientific fields (though a majority of them eventually withered).
[1][8] At its core the CCL still is a mailing list, a quaint survivor from early Internet time, in which discussions take place about general principles, practical interpretations of theory, and computational methods.
The flame wars (as the liveliest episodes) give valuable and unique information to historians to comprehend what is at stake in the computational chemistry community.
A number of groups exist on Facebook and LinkedIn, and increasingly also in the online platforms of learned societies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in which discussions on subjects similar to the CCL's take place.
They may oppose less friction to membership, provide richer interactions, and supply software, datasets, literature, and other resources, in formats with which especially younger researchers and students are familiar.
Mailing lists archives are a unique opportunity for historians to explore interactions, debates, even tensions among scientists that reveal a lot about scientific communities: they constitute an important alternative to more official sources such as published papers.
[1] This article was adapted from the following source under a CC BY 4.0 license (2019) : Frédéric Wieber; Alejandro Pisanty; Alexandre Hocquet (18 December 2018).