Positive and negative at RLUK

#rluk10 #quixote

It’s been a great day at RLUK. Lots of progress towards Openness. We discovered millions of open bibliographic records. A great day for the Edinburgh node of the OKF. Lots of contact with the University, the National Library of Scotland. Deep nostalgia for my many years in this country. A better legal system. A more united view. The Enlightenment looks down on us and encourages us to greater endeavour. The colonies look to their Scottish past.

And then we got to talking about publishers. Yes, they’re in it for the money. Some of them care about the community. But increasingly the scholarly societies are defecting either to selling out their society journals to publishers who couldn’t care about the discipline or trying to emulate the commercial publishers. Result – a void in the support of scholarship in many disciplines. Where are the community standards for acceptable scientific practice? They cannot come from commercial publishers – they can only come from societies – national or international. The best of these are great. The International union of Crystallography is a paragon – creating ontologies, recording methodologies – caring about the discipline. The European Geoscience Union (EGU) is another – with its commitment to Open Access, its continual process of discussion. The AMBSM – which cares for standards in reporting bioscience.

But there are huge vacuums…

And that’s why a growing group of us are defining the practice and reporting of computational chemistry. It’s been abandoned by the scientists many of whom have sold their souls to the god of commerce. No-one at the top cares about interoperability, quality. It’s the easiest scientific discipline I know of to provide standards and ontologies. That’s because God created Quantum Mechanics (in a humorous off day) and Schroedinger showed us how to compute God’s creation.

It’s been waiting for 30 years for an ontology. And Quixote is creating it.

That’s my relaxation for the train journey back tomorrow.

Train journeys are fun.

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