Chemistry World Blog

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That’s the ACS meeting over for now, but I should post a last blog entry on the Evolving Network of Scientific Communication session, which happened on Tuesday.

Hardly any of the talks had a specifically chemical focus, though. Google Scholar, of course, applies the algorithms they use for hyperlinks and web pages to citations and journal articles, nothing specifically chemical there.

Joanna Scott of Nature talked about Connotea, a tool which lets you keep track of citations while browsing the web (and incidentally share these with other people), but that has no support for chemical structures, just tagging.

There were three key exceptions in the morning: Nick Day (Cambridge) talked about the crystallographic portal he’s working on for his PhD thesis (and about Project Prospect as well, but modesty forbids). Henry Rzepa (Imperial) talked about semantic markup of a paper by Perkin on mauveine to work out whether computers could spot the mistake Perkin made in assigning the structure (nobody noticed till 1994). But before him there was a surprising speaker.

Tony Hey of Microsoft talked about the CombeChem project at Southampton, and indicated that Microsoft were keen on desktop science and starting to get involved. They dwarf existing giants like the Chemical Abstracts Service and Elsevier MDL, so the field could get very interesting indeed.

Great talk yesterday (in the Physical session) from Eric Kool at Stanford. He’s been looking at how certain protein complexes use small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to destroy other bits of RNA, that is to say RNA interference, a phenomenon which won its discoverers the Nobel Prize not so long ago. (more…)

One of the joys of the ACS meeting is that it brings so many people working in the field so close together; you can leave a session on one topic, and, in just twenty short minutes, walk to another different session on a very similar topic.

The CINF session in honour of Gary Wiggins, who’s retiring from Indiana this year, had Peter Murray-Rust and Steve Heller talking about how social computing (blogs and wikis, or to use Steve’s felicitous portmanteau, MyFace) is going to change absolutely everything in cheminformatics (the study of applying computers to general chemical problems, not just computational or theoretical chemistry), and incidentally being very nice about the RSC and Project Prospect. Then I went over to the Chemistry Education session on blogs and wikis, where Barb Greenman, a librarian at the University of Colorado Boulder, was talking about the survey she’d done of the chemists and others there and how they felt about open access and blogging.

The interesting thing for me was the huge number of people who felt that blogging your results could hamper later publication. So presenting some incomplete work at a conference in front of possibly hundreds of people and most of your potential referees isn’t necessarily a problem, but posting it on a blog which might only be read by you and your mother (there’s no structure or substructure searching for blogs of course) could be! I’d be delighted to see your comments.

I’m Colin Batchelor, by the way. I’ve been working on Project Prospect for the past year or so, and I’ll be talking on Wednesday morning at the CINF session on Advanced Mining at 0920, so if you want to find out more, come along.

By the way, here’s a demo and feature runthrough of the RSC’s Project Prospect and eBook Collection, which you can also see at booth #314-320