Jean-Claude has started his Open Chemistry experiment (in both senses – chemistry and Open). He will record everything on the Wiki and then – presumably when there is some publishable “golden moment” send the manuscript off.
I am floating the idea of a repository which manages the actual versioning of the manuscript. Hopefully we can put together something that supports JC. For the experimental we should be capturing material now, of course, though the technology is a bit young. There is also no reason why we shouldn’t start the M?S now as well.
If the paper is accepted the software should then remember the original author manuscript so that when the final PDF appears it can be liberated to the world. Of course this would be largely ritual as we would already have seen all the previous versions!!!
=== JC ===
Wiki Paper Experiment Started
Anatomy of the Ugi Reaction and Attempted Cyclization to Diketopiperazines
Abstract
Reaction profiling using H NMR spectroscopy was used to elucidate the kinetics and progression of the 4-component Ugi reaction, involving an aldehyde, an amine, a carboxylic acid and an isonitrile. Aromatic aldehydes such as benzaldehyde, veratraldehyde and piperonal were found to react smoothly with 5-methylfurfurylamine and t-butylamine to yield imines in methanol. Phenylacetaldehyde led to intractable (product mixtures within minutes of adding to the amine component. The addition of boc-gly alone led to a reversal of the imine formation, while the addition of boc-gly with t-butyl isonitrile or benzyl isonitrile led to a more limited reversal to the aldehyde that peaked after about 30 min before diminishing again over several days. The Ugi products started to crystallize within hours or days. 2-morpholinoethyl isonitrile did not generate Ugi products, apparently due to its instability in the presence of boc-gly.
The experiment will consist in seeing which chemistry publishers will accept a paper written on a public wiki and the use of links to experiment pages on a laboratory notebook wiki as valid references. As I learned from a talk by one our librarians Jane Bryan a few weeks ago, publishers are really becoming tolerant of pre-prints hosted on institutional repositories. This is really not that different.
Who knows – it might even work for an ACS journal. We’ll see.
And in the meantime, feedback is welcome on the drafts.
(Note that Alicia also started writing her Masters Thesis on the wiki.)
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Peter – one of the reasons I am using the wiki to write the paper is that it does a pretty good job with capturing versions and who edited what over time.