Category Archives: open issues

Hamburger House of Horrors (1)

Posted on September 23, 2006 by pm286

This is an occasional series indebted to Hammer House of Horrors. You don’t need to be a chemist to understand the message. It’s sparked off by a comment from Totally Synthetic in this blog: A good deal of the reasoning … Continue reading →

Posted in chemistry, data, open issues | 7 Comments

Chemistry, Chess and Computers

Posted on September 21, 2006 by pm286

Sometime in the 1970’s the Amer. Chem. Soc. published a review of Computers in Chemistry (cannot remember date or title and I’ve lost my copy) and it has remained an inspiration ever since. In it was summarised the work of … Continue reading →

Posted in chemistry, open issues, programming for scientists | 8 Comments

The cost of decaying scientific data

Posted on September 20, 2006 by pm286

My colleague John Davies, who provides a crystallographic service for the deparment has estimated that the data for 80% of crystal structures (in any chemistry department) never leave the laboratory. They are locally archived, perhaps on CDROM, perhaps on a … Continue reading →

Posted in data, open issues | 3 Comments

Moderatorial

Posted on September 17, 2006 by pm286

A recent anonymous comment on this blog read In that case, perhaps you should have parted with the observation “ACS is a problem”. :-), but partly serious. I thnk the tone of this is out of keeping with this blog … Continue reading →

Posted in open issues | Leave a comment

OSCAR reviews a journal

Posted on September 17, 2006 by pm286

In the last post I described OSCAR, which can review and extract chemical data from published articles. Here is how I used it to review the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry The BJOC unlike most other chemistry journals encourages reader’s … Continue reading →

Posted in chemistry, open issues | 1 Comment

OSCAR, the chemical data checker

Posted on September 17, 2006 by pm286

I spent yesterday reviewing the data in BJOC (the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry) (articles). This is a new (ca. 1 year) and important journal as it is the first free-to-author and free-to-read journal in chemistry, supported by the Beilstein … Continue reading →

Posted in chemistry, open issues | 6 Comments

Linus' Law and community peer-review

Posted on September 17, 2006 by pm286

Linus Torvalds of Linux fame is creand dited with the law “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” In a communal Open Source project every developer and every tester (or user when the code is released) can contribute bugs to … Continue reading →

Posted in "virtual communities", open issues | Leave a comment

Useful Chemistry: Publish and be…?

Posted on September 16, 2006 by pm286

It was great to meet Jean-Claude Bradley, the guru of the Useful Chemistry blog at the Am. Chem. Soc meeting. The Useful chemistry blog has a remarkable and valuale feature – J-C publishes chemistry as it is being done. To … Continue reading →

Posted in "virtual communities", chemistry, open issues | Leave a comment

Blue Obelisk Award – Christoph Steinbeck of CDK

Posted on September 14, 2006 by pm286

Last night we met at the Thirsty Bear pub in San Francisco. This was the second anniversary of the first BO meeting (in San Diego). There were nine of us, and the membership and programs are growing. People are taking … Continue reading →

Posted in "virtual communities", chemistry, open issues | Leave a comment

Blue Obelisk Award – Bob Hanson of Jmol

Posted on September 14, 2006 by ojd20

The Blue Obelisk Open Source group has now achieved a critical mass of high quality software, especially in chemoinformatics, chemical text analysis, editing and infrastructure such as markup languages (CML). We are begginning to be taken seriously and more collaborators … Continue reading →

Posted in chemistry, open issues | 2 Comments