Monthly Archives: May 2008

ChEBI has been very important to us – here’s Duncan Hull: Building a Better ChEBI Chemical Entitites of Biological Interest, ChEBI, is a freely available dictionary [1] of molecular entities, especially small chemical compounds. Like all big dictionaries and ontologies, … Continue reading →

Antony Williams (Chemspiderman) has posted a useful comment on this blog under ( I am still DELIGHTED with Chemspider – May 10th, 2008) – [I sometimes have trouble with permalinks to comments]. I’ll pick up some points and reply, but … Continue reading →

Wikipedia is (rightly) becoming the first place that people look for well-understood scientific information including chemistry. Chemical compounds are particularly suited as the concept is over 150 years old and it is universal practice to index parts of chemistry through … Continue reading →

Peter Suber has again been foiled by our WordPress comment system and I copy his latest one and comment on it. Hi Peter[MR]:  Some people objected to “weak OA” on the ground that it disparaged some difficult and significant achievements.  … Continue reading →

I’ve been investigating Peter’s missing comments problem, and have found the cause, but not yet the solution… The comments to these blogs are passed through the Akismet spam filter before going to the human spam filter (Peter) before being posted. … Continue reading →

With all of the delicacy of an elephant dissecting fruit flies I have jumped into three issues, all of which require careful reply and may take a little while. Meanwhile I have a talk to give on Open Access next … Continue reading →

Glyn Moody has taken me to task for espousing Word as a tool that should be considered for archival of scholarly output. Not Word alone, but as a supplement to PDF. I explained my reasons and motivation. Now Glyn has … Continue reading →

A few days ago I applauded (blog post) ChemSpider for releasing their data under CC-SA and I still do. CC-SA is compliant with the BBB defintion/declaration. There has been some apparent criticism of this  created because I unintentionally posted a … Continue reading →

Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation reviews the postings over the last few days on the new ideas of strongOA and weakOA. Beyond Strong and Weak: Towards a Typology of Open Access 03:01 09/05/2008, Jonathan Gray, Over the past … Continue reading →

The  Open Knowledge Foundation has a clear and pragmatic approach to making knowledge (data, creative works, monographs, etc.) Open. It’s very clear what Open Knowledge is (The Open Knowledge Definition) (unlike Open Access which is still working out what it … Continue reading →