Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was honoured last week to be invited by Professor Xiaoxia Li to speak at the 14th Asian Chemistry Congress in Bangkok and then to visit her group in Beijing. Unfortunately I couldn’t spend longer but the visit impressed me … Continue reading →

I am talking tomorrow as an invited lecturer to the 14th Asian Chemical Congress in the Cheminformatics section (http://www.14acc.org/speakers.htm#s8). My message is the Cheminformatics needs Open resources (as in http://www.opendefinition.org/ ). I am not arguing that everything should be Open, … Continue reading →

#opencryst At #iucr2011 Saulius Grazulis and I agreed to set up Open Crystallography. We’ve both been working in this area (he with the Crystallography Open Database community (http://www.crystallography.net/ ) and our group with Crystaleye (http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye/ ), Chempound for crystals (http://crystaleye.ch.cam.ac.uk/ … Continue reading →

I’ve been to all the SOLO meetings (Aug/Sept) and really enjoyed them. The earlier ones concentrated on blogging and it was a great way to meet other bloggers. They have gradually moved towards adding other types of online activity, with … Continue reading →

YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOW ANY CHEMISTRY – THE POINT IS DIFFERENT. But you should have 70 USD ready. I came across the following paper today: Reductive and Transition-Metal-Free: Oxidation of Secondary Alcohols by Sodium Hydride Xinbo Wang, Bo Zhang, … Continue reading →

  #solo11 (Science Online) is fantastic as ever and very different from last year. Masses of great people to meet. Today (through Martin Fenner ) we’re going to look at how to use blogs for science. I’ll probably be blogging … Continue reading →

This is the text of a letter I have sent to Dr Colin Groom, Director of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. For context, read my blog posts (/pmr/ ) over the last 4 days. “sourceCIFs” are raw data created as … Continue reading →

I have had a really useful suggestion about how to make data deposited with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) Open. The Hargreaves report has recommended that text- and data-mining of the scientific literature should be allowed and the government … Continue reading →

In a previous post I showed a letter form Colin Groom of the CCDC indicating reasons why the CCDC could not make its deposited crystallographic data (source CIFS) Open /pmr/2011/08/28/iucr2011-reply-from-ccdc-on-restrictions-on-redistributing-cifs/ This is disappointing because otherwise we would be able to … Continue reading →

I wrote to Colin Groom of the CCDC requesting the release of authors’ raw CIFs (supporting information) into the public domain. I have now had a reply which I publish below. This will alter what I say at my presentation … Continue reading →