Chemistry World Blog

We thought we’d follow up our press release and Tony Williams’ post a couple of days later, to add in a few more details and to respond to a couple of the questions that we’ve received. (more…)

We’ve just released a few new features based around the RSC Prospect project to enhance our articles. Some of these features are cosmetic and improve the look and feel, and some are deeply semantic and a bit specialist – but both take another step towards the future. (more…)

We would like to ask for your help – we need your input and perspective as a chemistry researcher in order to better understand how you communicate with your academic colleagues, particularly in using digital methods. We would like to understand more about how you locate, evaluate, organise, manage, transform, communicate and re-use research information in your field.

We would like to ask you to take 15 minutes to fill in a brief online survey. Your input will provide vital insight into understanding methods of scholarly communications in the fields of chemistry and will help us to plan advocacy programmes to encourage the take up of new methodologies and technologies to improve the access to, use and re-use of content by UK academics in this field. The survey is part of a study project undertaken by Publishing Directions (UK) Ltd on behalf of JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee – and with some help from RSC.

The survey will be live online from 30th January – 13th February. You can access it here (www.rsc.org/advocacy*). Any answers you provide will be treated as strictly confidential and shared only with JISC in an aggregated format.

In order to thank you for your time, you will be given the opportunity to enter a Prize Draw, with prizes of 5 £40 Amazon vouchers to be won.

If you have any queries about the survey, please contact Bill Town (bill /dot/ town /at/ kilmorie /dot/ com).

With thanks

Rich
*Note – the url above resolves to a surveymonkey page. This is deliberate and not a cunning phishing attack.

When trying to publish the best research in interesting ways, having a new problem to solve often presents difficult questions – and not all of them technical.

Dalton Transactions and PCCP have recently published two papers from Henry Rzepa and within each paper was an interactive HTML table – buttons can be pressed to bring up a series of different jmol (3-D, rotatable) views of molecules, which look great. They also contained links to data stored in the Imperial College London institutional repository. Henry was also keen that they be part of the paper itself, rather than being supplementary data, so the questions we had to deal with were:
a) what do we do with the table in print?, and
b) how do we handle the repository links?

(more…)

Just to trail in an appropriate forum the excellent feature article in the December issue of Chemistry World, Surfing Web₂0, which looks at some of the ways in which the publishing of chemistry on the web is evolving…

…and to draw attention to a new vacancy in our Informatics team within RSC Publishing. We developed and launched the RSC’s Project Prospect to great acclaim this year, and we’re looking for another Analyst to prototype new ways of bringing published chemical science research to life. It’s a great opportunity to develop ideas and shape how we get the authors’ research to readers in the years to come.

If you want to know more about this position contact me at kiddr at rsc dot org, and apply via our HR department as described on the job posting.

One of our longest serving colleagues. Peter Whittington, retired from the RSC last week. He joined Chem. Commun. in 1969 and as part of his clearout he donated some old zinc plates, which was how we used to publish the chemistry in our journals – each block of compounds was burned onto photosensitive plates then etched out and cleaned up for the presses.

I hadn’t come across these before, so I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised that there’s not a great understanding of the way the current scientific publication process works (see some comments on the Word 2007 maths handling and an excellent explanation of why publishers are finding this a huge problem from Nature’s Howard Ratner).

Of course now CTP systems have made the zinc plates redundant, but online with Project Prospect we’re now creating some structures automatically from the compound InChI (which mostly works sensibly) – not as a replacement for the authors’ artwork but as an additional feature for the reader and to allow us to bring back additional information and link to associated papers. The InChIs and generated images of the primary compounds of interest are also being published in our RSS feeds, so as we publish our articles through the day anyone can pick up a live feed of the chemistry and biomedical ontology terms contained within.