CrystalEye GreaseMonkey

Nick Day has just released a Greasemonkey script which provides a full crystallographic overlay for existing journals. It’s worth trying as it’s visually exciting as well as very useful. This post tells you what it does, how it works, and why all publishers will actually benefit from making their crystallographic data Open.
The CrystalEye GreaseMonkey (Javascript) needs to be installed (from http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/11439) inside your Firefox browser. (I don’t believe this is a risk, but make your own decision). It is then activated whenever a new page is loaded from certain sites (e.g. pubs.acs.org/* for any ACS journals). You scan switch in on of off from the box and also decide which sites you wish to visit.

When it finds a DOI in the page (usually from a TOC) it asks the CrystalEye site whether this DOI is listed as one containing one or more crystal structures. (CrystalEye contains over 100,000 crystal structures, most from the last 5 years but some, via the Crystallographic Open Database, going back several decades). CrystalEye returns the addresses of those structures corresponding to the given DOI. The Greasemonkey then adds the CrystalEye logo (I have removed the publisher’s graphic because of copyright).

The blue eye (because this is a BlueObelisk-eyed monkey) indicates crystals and in this case there are three [1][2][3]. Clicking on the first immediately loads the Jmol applet and the metadata:

The links are direct to the publisher’s site and if you have a licence (or if the article is Open Access) you’ll be able to read the fulltext. The material here is all automatically derived from the data (no images or text have been taken). You can even see what we calculate the chemical structure to be:

Again all this is automatic. (Credits to Jmol and – right- CDK structure diagram generator).
So here we have something very close to an overlay journal. No textual commentary, but we are working on that.
So thank you to Dave Martinsen of ACS for reviewing Greasemonkey. And we hope that it increases the clicks on your full-text – people will see the crystal structure and be so excited they will wish to read the full article.
It also works for RSC, IUCr and others like American Mineralogist. But not for Wiley, Springer and Elsevier. Not because we have anything against them, but because they don’t make their structures available. CrystalEye cannot find them, so it can’t point to them. And so, publishers, you are losing out to those publishers who DO expose their crystallography. And perhaps CrystalEye will persuade authors to publish their structures where they can be most seen.