Monthly Archives: September 2007

NSF/JISC meeting on eScience/cyberinfrastructure

I was privileged to be at a meeting between JISC (UK) and NSF (US). Every paragraph of the report is worth reading – I quote a few… William Y. Arms and Ronald L. Larsen, The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building … Continue reading

Posted in cyberscience, open issues | Leave a comment

Open grant writing. Can the Chemical Blogosphere help with "Agents and Eyeballs"

In the current spirit of Openness I’m appealing to the chemical blogosphere for help. Jim Downing and I are writing a grant proposal for UK’s JISC : supporting education and research – which supports digital libraries, repositories, eScience/cyberinfrastructure, collaborative working, … Continue reading

Posted in "virtual communities", blueobelisk, cyberscience | 6 Comments

Volunteers: does the computer experience translate to chemistry?

One of the spinoffs of having been to scifoo is that I skim over 50+posts / day from the blogs that participants run. Some are multi-author blogs:  Here’s Andy Oram on Tim O’Reilly’s blog, talking about what makes volunteer documenters … Continue reading

Posted in blueobelisk | Leave a comment

Open Access at Abbey Square

Yesterday Jim Downing, Nick Day and I were the guests of Peter Strickland and Brian McMahon at the International Union of Crystallography in their gorgeous offices at Abbey Square, Chester UK . The IUCr is a member of ICSU – … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Four theses and a repository

I’ve been advocating that all theses should be deposited in institutional repositories under CC-BY licences, and here’s an interlude with 4 I have personal knowledge of. I’m keeping the authors secret, although those in the know will identify some. ONE … Continue reading

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Chemical Speeddrawing

There used to be an advert on the London Tube advertising “Speedwriting” (something like “f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb”. What about speed-drawing of chemical structures? Here’s Liquid Carbon: Finally, I’d like to offer a … Continue reading

Posted in chemistry | 3 Comments

The Obelisk SMILES

We are delighted that Craig James has suggested making the molecular format SMILES an Open activity. Egin Willighagen writes: SMILES to become an Open Standard 08:03 28/09/2007, Egon Willighagen, Craig James wants to make SMILES an open standard, and this … Continue reading

Posted in blueobelisk, chemistry, open issues | 2 Comments

What's in a name? hexanoic acid still smells of goats

In a recent post I said – rather crudely – that there was no absolute way of understanding chemical names. I have been (rightly) taken to task for imprecision: ChemSpiderMan Says: September 25th, 2007 at 5:04 am e I’m not … Continue reading

Posted in chemistry, open issues | 5 Comments

Structures that InChI and SMILES can't represent

Even in organic chemistry there are lots of strucures that cannot be represented by InChIs and currently cannot be communicated without structure diagrams. I’ve gone randomly to Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (as it’s Open Access) and found three consecutive … Continue reading

Posted in chemistry, open issues | 1 Comment

Grazie!

I made the sweeping assertion at Berlin5 that no-one other than me was blogging (I asked for a show of hands), and am delighted to be proved wrong: Paolo Gardois Says: September 24th, 2007 at 3:30 pm e Firstly, compliments … Continue reading

Posted in berlin5 | 1 Comment