Knowing the future would make planning how to get there a lot easier, if only we – or predictors of researchers’ behaviour or technology – had that ability. What I’ll be demonstrating is some of the approaches that the RSC have taken to evolve publications in the chemical sciences and what the results have been – certainly not always what we expected. This includes the Prospect semantic markup of chemistry, pulling together our entire publishing content in a single delivery platform, and how ChemSpider as a free chemical resource has enabled us to explore different publishing and service options. Inevitably there will be some references to catalysis, activation energy barriers, and maybe even crystallisation – but in a behavioural context.