Wow! I posted a request yesterday (sic) for supporting material for our proposal to JISC for a person to support the blogosphere as a major resource for increasing the quality of published chemistry. I have had valuable contributions from 4 people already and now Egon has created a wonderful summary – just the right length. We’ll either include it as it stands of point to it from the proposal – depends on space. [Recall that Egon’s Chemical Blogspace blog aggregates the whole of chemical blogspace.]
Peter is writing up a 1FTE grant proposal for someone to work on the question how automatic agents and, more interestingly, the blogosphere are changing, no improving, the dissemination of scientific literature. He wants our input. To make his work easy, I’ll tag this item pmrgrantproposal and would ask everyone to do the same (Peter unfortunately did not suggest a tag himself). Here are pointers to blog items I wrote, related to the four themes Peter identifies.
The blogosphere oversees all major Open discussion
- Open Text Mining Interface and Bioclipse
- USPTO considers open source software prior art
- New InChI software beta: license issues resolved and InChIKey
- SMILES to become an Open Standard
The blogosphere cares about data
- Uncertainty in NMR based 3D protein models
- re: ACS RSS feeds are messed up
- Molecules in Wikipedia without InChIs
Important bad science cannot hide
I do not feel much like pointing to bad scientific articles, but want to point to the enormous amount of literature being discussed in Chemical blogspace: 60 active chemical blogs discussed just over 1300 peer-reviewed papers from 213 scientific journals in less than 10 months. The top 5 journals have 133, 78, 68, 57 and 48 papers discussed in 22, 24, 10, 11 and 18 different blogs respectively. (Peter, if you need more in depth statistics, just let me know…)
Two examples where I discuss not-bad-at-all scientific literature:Open Notebook Science
I regularly blog about the chemoinformatics research I do in my blog. A few examples from the last half year:
- CDK Workshop – Days #3 and #4
- Weka Decision Trees to Java Conversion
- RDF-ing molecular space
- Atom typing in the CDK
- Further Bioclipse QSAR functionality development
Update: after comments I have removed one link, which I need to confirm first.
PMR: A few comments. Yes, I didn’t include a tag – but as I have said before the blogosphere rapidly converges. I sympathize with Egon that I don’t particularly like pointing to bad articles. However whent eh robots start refereeing journals – as they will in out project – they don’t have sentiments and if they find bad data they will expose it without a qualm. Of course we will have to check they “hardly ever” make mistakes (no one is perfect). And, of course, if you publish in Open Access journals there is no place to hide.