Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future: Open Bibliography, BibSoup and BibJSON

I am delighted to say that the special issue of the PM-R symposium (Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future in January) has now been published by Biomed Central in J. Cheminformatics (http://www.jcheminf.com/ ). There’s fifteen papers and I hope that you’ll find many of them interesting. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A CHEMIST TO UNDERSTAND THE OVERALL IDEAS OF MOST OF THEM. Several are about Open Scholarship, others about semantics.

One of the broadest papers is on Open Bibliography:

Open Bibliography for Science, Technology, and Medicine
Richard Jones, Mark MacGillivray, Peter Murray-Rust, Jim Pitman, Peter Sefton, Ben O’Steen, William Waites
Journal of Cheminformatics 2011, 3:47 (14 October 2011)
[Abstract] [Provisional PDF]

Conventionalist: Hang on – why are you publishing an article on Bibliography in a Journal of Cheminformatics?

PMR: Because it’s Open access. (and because the editors have been very constructive in processing the symposium output)

Conv: But shouldn’t you publish it in a library journal.

PMR: Why?

Conv: Because it’s about bibliography.

PMR: Doesn’t matter where I publish it.

Conv: But the people who need to read it won’t find it.

PMR: You’ve found it – by reading my blog.

Conv: But that’s just chance.

PMR: Not really. People have many ways of finding information. In fact Open Bibliography is all about new ways of finding scientific information.

Conv: But that’s the point of journals.

PMR: No longer. We use all sorts of search engines, links, robots, etc. Journals are outdated.

Conv: They’re needed for all sorts of things – editors, impact factors.

PMR: No, it WHAT I write that matters. Not WHERE I publish. It means people will actually have to read papers to determine whether they are any good. Try reading this one for a start.

Conv: Hmm.

PMR: No, read it. There’s lots of ideas on how we can make bibliography simple for scientists. And we’ve got the software already written.

Conv: Hmm, Hmm.

PMR: I’ll be writing more about the articles in this issue. But the Bib one is a good one to start with. I am off to visit and collaborate with Jim Pitman next week.