Corrections and Retractions from the GreaseMonkey

Posted on April 28, 2007 by pm286

In Correction/Retraction Notice Noel O’Blog (Noel was in our Centre until recently) shows how the Blue Obelisk Greasemonkey can show a richer view of the chemical literature. The greasemonkey, developed by Noel and others and reported in Blue Obelisk mailing lists and (Using Javascript and Greasemonkey for Chemistry – Bowiki), is a clever little thing. It sits in your (Firefox) browser and reads every HTML page you load. Everytime it sees some chemistry (including journal names) it recognises it can add links to the page. So the page becomes enhanced, enriched.
Noel has applied it to the case of the chemistry retractions in ACS publications. When I tried to follow up ChemBark’s story I had DOIs but no links. With the BO greasemonkey these DOIs get translated to links which I can follow. In this way Noel has constructed the complete set of linked correction/retractions – there appear to have been at least 6 papers which have been affected. I think you can see from this that the blogosphere pays a positive role in helping post-hoc peer-review in chemistry.
Noeal highlights the fact that anyone reading the original paper does not know that a retraction has been made. Obviously this is not possible in paper journals, but I would have expected a publisher to put up a note saying “this paper has been retracted/corrected”. I am now thoroughly confused as to what I am seeing at the end of a DOI. The fundamental questions are:

Is a DOI and identifier to a static piece of information (which is what I would expect – as it stands for Digital Object Identifier) or
Is a DOI a controlled addressing system managed by a purchaser of DOIs. IOW can a purchaser put different versions of the same information under the same identifier

If it is the former, then we have some chance of preserving the scientific record. If the latter, the purchaser of the DOI can rewrite history whenever they choose.
Of course that is true of much web information. For example I sometimes edit a post on this blog after the first publication. Mainly to correct typos or add clarification. But, unlike a publisher, I cannot change the record. When this post is published it gets aggregated by Planet BlueObelisk which effectively acts as a record. (It’s actually because certain typos and styles foul up the Planet that I edit the post later). The posts are also captured by Technorati – and are probably cached in many other places. And these caches have timestamps.
Admittedly this leads to a potentially confused set of versions but it is possible to reconstruct history. Unless publishing is made Open, history will be mutable.

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Sanctity of the scientific record

Posted on April 27, 2007 by pm286

I have not read the chemical blogosphere for some time (other than Blue Obelisk) and have been catching up with some of this in the plane. This is ChemBark from January and some my specific comments may be out of date, but the general questions remain. Scholars of scientific accuracy/fraud may wish to pursue the posts (which are IMO a valuable addition to the formal review process).
=== ChemBark ==
Interesting…

Posted by Paul on January 11th, 2007

I missed this since I read JACS by the ASAP alerts and every single addition/correction from Sames has been allowed to bypass the system. A tip of my hat to the kind person who e-mailed it.Edit: I don’t have the time right now to investigate the e-mail’s note that the original supporting information file has been altered so that you cannot compare the new SI with the old, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll get to it tonight, but feel free to investigate this lead on your own. On the surface, it doesn’t look good.Edited again: The supporting information files from 2005 and 2007 appear to be identical. They are also many many pages long, and I’m busy, so you probably won’t get a post from me today. Sorry.=======
I haven’t read this in detail so have no idea whether the question of scientific fraud has been resolved. My concern is about the scholarly record. On pursuing the links I find the correction/retraction:
Direct Palladium-Catalyzed C-2 and C-3 Arylation of Indoles: A Mechanistic Rationale for Regioselectivity [J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2005, 127, 8050-8057].
Benjamin S. Lane, Meghann A. Brown, and Dalibor Sames*
For comparison purposes, this article refers to a palladium-catalyzed arylation of free azoles in the presence of magnesium oxide, published previously in a separate communication. Although the magnesium oxide procedure has recently been found irreproducible (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2006, 128, 8364), this fact does not affect the conclusions of this paper. Consequently, the magnesium oxide protocol has been removed from the Supporting Information. Also, Figures S5 and S8 have been replaced with corrected versions.

Supporting Information Available

Experimental procedures, spectral data, and base optimization data (corrected). This material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.01/03/2007
—-
I make now comment on the question of misconduct, but am concerned with the sanctity of the scientific record. The publishers’ statement could be interpreted as implying that the record has been amended, rather than that an amended piece of information has been added to the scientific record. The blogosphere certainly queried this – I don’t know whether it has been resolved.
However the ACS policy on journals is then worrying:

“Socialized Science” (ACS[*] commentary on NIH)

RUDY M. BAUM, Editor-in-Chief, C&E News,
September 20 2004 Volume 82, Number 38 p. 7
I find it incredible that a Republican Administration would institute a policy that will have the long-term effect of shifting responsibility for communicating scientific research and maintaining the archive of STM [1] literature from the private sector to the federal government.

What is important to realize is that a subscription to  an STM journal is no longer […] a  subscription; in fact, it is an access fee to a database maintained by  the publisher. 

[…] one important consequence of electronic publishing is to shift primary responsibility for maintaining the archive of STM literature from libraries to publishers. I know that publishers like the American Chemical Society are committed to maintaining the archive of material they publish. Maintaining an archive, however, costs money.
(PM-R’s emphasis and ellipses)
[*] American Chemical Society
—-
The scientific record is thus not a paper or even epaper journal – it is a set of database records. With paper journals the record was very clearly preseved – mutliple copies were distributed and could never be recalled. Here there is effectively only one record and it is controlled by the publisher. (I know that certain depositing libraries have electronic copies, but it is unrealistic for the average scientist to pursue this).
I don’t doubt that Rudy Baum has a sincere commitment to preserving the scientific record. But I can imagine cases – with less reputable publishers – where it was embarassing to the publisher for the record to be visible and it was convenient for the database to be amended.
There is another point which the chemical community should take seriously if it cares about the accuracy of scientific publications – and certainly the blogosphere does. ChemBark says that it is impossible to check by eye whether the copies are identical or what has been changed. I gather that there might be PDF diff tools but I don’t have one. OTOH if the supporting information were in CML then it would be possible to compare not only the text but also the spectra, compounds, etc.
So I’d like to be sure that the complete record is available. And encourage chemical cows rather than chemical hamburgers

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–var SA_ID=”acspix;acspix”; (I have quoted this without permission and argue fair use).
The publisher states that figures in the supporting information have been replaced. There is some doubt in the blogosphere as to whether an amended copy of the supporting information was added to the scientific record or whether the record itself was changed. If it is the latter then it is very serious. The ACS policy is:

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Centralisation or Federation?

Posted on April 26, 2007 by pm286

Greg Pearl Says:
April 25th, 2007 at 1:08 pm eSo is the World Wide Molecular Matrix planning on Collating data? All I was able to find was chemical structure generation. If you are planning on Collating the data ACD/Labs would be happy to also provide the WWMM with logP prediction capabilities, as we have done with Chemspider and eMolecules.
[…]So here is a quick suggestion, maybe we should focus assisting the efforts on curating the world’s chemical information opposed to simple pointing out flaws in Beta software that is making the first pass at collating the data, which from my experience is the first step required in eventually curating the data. So i would like to personally thank PubChem, eMolecules and Chemspider for making the first attempts at collecting all the chemical data available. FYI, when I was examining the Chemspider website it appears that anyone can provide feedback, so we could constructively suggest that chemspider add a new field that would allow the users to curate the data. So in the same vane as wikipedia. FYI, the chemspider substructure search of calcium carbonate does provide a link to wikipedia.

=== PMR ===
The WWMM is a federated model while Chemspider is a centralised one. The WWMM is based on developing an agreed set of metadata for discovery and re-use based on Dublin Core, and more recently METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) Official Web Site) and the newly developed OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative Protocol – Object Exchange and Reuse) protocol for repositories. The federated model is based on sharing data and not duplicating entities, while the centralised model is based on duplicating and possessing data.
The world is moving towards federated models where search engines visit repositories and extract what they wish. There is little point in copying data – the modern approach is to take the software to the data. It relies on it being public and Open – which Pubchem, WWMM and similar sites are. In WWMM we are developing a number of repositories where the data are new and unique to the repository and where the links will be passed to Pubchem for indexing and searching (there will also be local search facilities).
OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting – v.2.0) and OAI-ORE provide interfaces which allow search engines to extract metadata and data from repositories without human intervention. I am an advisor to the ORE project and will be meeting with the architects tomorrow – more later.

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Alpha and beta

Posted on April 25, 2007 by pm286

From the discussion on ChemZoo:

Antony Williams Says:
April 25th, 2007 at 3:00 pm eHi…banana-biter from ChemZoo here… one more at the chimps tea party.
ChemSpider uses third party components for the generation of certain properties. Passing over 10 million compounds through has shown a number of issues in the nature of the dataset and the applicability of the third party components to the diversity of the dataset. Feedback has been provided and the issues already addressed but passing 10 million structures through a series of prediction algorithms is not undertaken lightly and therefore will be performed in the near future.
The system was released in beta form. Known bugs are posted at http://www.chemspider.com/KnownBugs.aspx. As commented on the website at this page “We know that more bugs will be identified based on the testing of our users and the fastest way to receive real stress testing is to make the system public and ask for feedback….and where necessary, deal with the fallout and potential mocking. We encourage you to report bugs to us, as you find them, at bugs@chemspider.com. ”
So, thanks for the feedback. The monkeys will get back to our keyboards and address the feedback. We’d welcome the feedback through our feedback page rather than via blogs. That said…you have EVERY right to be concerned about quality..we are.
By the way, we believe that Wikipedia is a very valuable resource. That’s why we have linked up the synonyms from ChemSPider out to Wikipedia. Repeat your search on Calcium Carbonate and click on Caltrate for example to get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caltrate.
Clearly this type of linkage also throws up errors in the linkage to wikipedia and we’ll be optimizing shortly. In order to help build the public curation process we have put up a “Help Curate Data” link. This was always our intention…to create a chemical community around the chemical structure database…and your posting simply accelerated it. Now we hope that we’ll be joined by more monkey’s on typewriters in the ChemZoo…actually, the preference is flies on the Spider web!
By the way, in trying to get further connection to Wikipedia there is work being done right now to enable the ChemSketch drawing package to export PNG files with embedded InChI (and why not other structure data…formula, formula weight..even logP) and then searchable directly from a drawing package or through ChemSpider. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chemistry/Structure_drawing_workgroup
As well you know with your work on the Worldwide Molecular Matrix, not everything that goes live first day is perfect…and it’s why we have declared beta.

==== PMR ===
I leave it to readers to decide whether this is alpha or beta.
There is an implication in the replies that the community is invited to help clean up ChemZoo. Now ChemZoo is a commercial company, the data are not open (at least not explicitly – can anyone download the whole data base and if so what license covers it) and the software is not open. The community is expected to do the testing for the company (I see little sign from the known bugs that the alpha test was very strict – chemical formula searches were case-insensitive and order-sensitive, for example). A great concern abou “free services” is that the companies can switch them off at a moment’s notice – this happened with Chemfinder and caused serious problems with anyone who had built – say – educational resources round it. There is, and cannot be, any promise that the ChemZoo will not close its doors. In contrast Pubchem is open – anyone – like us can download the whole data.

As well you know with your work on the Worldwide Molecular Matrix, not everything that goes live first day is perfect…and it’s why we have declared beta.

The WWMM was – and is – a research project. We have very carefully reported our protocol and our metrics in peer-reviewed publications (not, unfortunately Open Access). A central tenet pf our work is that nothing is perfect and that it is important to measure the errors. Nick Day has done an excellent job of this in CrystalEye.

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Comments from chemspider

Posted on April 24, 2007 by pm286

Chemspider writes: –

Name: Monkey at Development | E-mail: valt@chemspider.com | URI: http://www.chemspider.com | IP: 68.33.203.5 | Date: April 24, 2007
Peter, good catch – thanks for reporting. I’ve put a notice that properties are calculated for the main component only. Hopefully this is it. Please keep reporting all problems which you’ll find – as you might seen this is the beta version and only with public comments and feedback we can improve it and make it useful.

This doesn’t solve it. There are several broken parts.

for CaCO3 the system created H2CO3 and calculated that
What is the point of calculating logP for a sodium Ion?
there is no point in calculating logP for calcium carbonate. It’s insoluble in water and octanol

To calculate meaningless stuff is to give the message that quality is unimportant. I have blogged on this today

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World Wide Molecular Matrix, Pubchem, quality metrics, etc.

Posted on April 24, 2007 by pm286

David Bradley has assured me he will take my concerns back to the ChemSpider people. This doesn’t remove them, and I’ll explain why.
There is no Open gold standard for chemical information. That’s a historical fact and we have to do what we can to put it right. Chemical information is difficult and the closed and restrictive nature of the commercial chemical software companies and the information suppliers means there have been no community efforts to solve problems of quality. As a result quality is appallingly low, as evidenced by my example.
The simple message is that many chemical software and information companies have had little concern for quality. The chemzoo experience shows that they don’t care what they output.
This is a very depressing experience for us in academia. Chemoinformatics is done on suspect data sets with closed software or bespoke not portable systems. Metrics are impossible. Computer scientists and others would be horrified (Peter Corbett and co. spend a lot of their time creating metrics for linguistic tools).
Pubchem offers the primary ray of hope. It has two main sources (correct me if I am wrong)

data from the NIH enviromnemt (NCI, Roadmap, etc.) which usually contains biological measurements
connnection tables, links and metadata donated from many organisations in the chemical community. Examples are the ZINC database from John Irwin, compounds in Nature Chemical biology, NMRShiftDB etc. When CrystalEye is released well give them ours.

The data in Pubchem is very variable. It has been accumulated over 30+ years in the search for anticancer compounds and others (JC is giving some of his compounds for screening). There were no good ways of managing the chemistry 35 years ago. Marc Niclaus from NCI has shown that 30% of the compounds are not what it says on the bottle. That’s fine – we are all clear about that. It’s not Pubchem’s role to sort out the historical data.
So there is junk in the historical record. And there is junk in some of the links donated. That may be where the Na2Cl2 for sodium chloride came from. If there is – say – an error rate of 1% (and I suspect it’s much higher) that’s 100,000 errors in pubchem. No single human will clean that up.
But one of the many virtues of Pubchem is that it is now THE open repository for molecular metadata. It seems obvious and natural that anyone wanting to open their data should give PC the metadata. And that’s what they do – Steve Bryant has some graphs showing the rise in depositions (can’t find it immediately).
But Pubchem is not, and should not be, a data repository except for NIH data. But nor should any other organisation try to aggregate all the data. Whar we should do is pool the metadata (InChIs, names, etc.( in pubchem and develop links and searches to distributed repositories and datasets elsewhere.
Surely it’s inefficient to seach over multiple databases? No, the bioscientists do it all the time using WebServices and workflows. Chemistry is 10 years behind in it’s thinking and would do well to look at modern ways of doing things rather than developing eMolecules, chemspider, etc. (As you can see they are all completely reliant on Pubchem to provide most of the resource).
What we should then develop is specialised data and metadata search engines. Of course Pubchem has a perfectly good substructure search so there is no need to create other ones and since Pubchem is open and the otehrs aren’t the OpenSource community can innovate and upgrade round Pubchem.
Where does this leave WWMM? I see this as a federated set of repositories for specialised purpose that link to Pubchem, but provide extra data. So Nick Day’s crystaleye has complete data on all legally accessible electronic crystal structures. In conjunctional with Jimmy Stewart (MOPAC) whom I visited last w/e we are going to run MOPAC over all of those which are of suitable quality. That will be tens of thousands. Each calculation will take 1-5 hours but our Condor system will be happy to do that. We’ll very carefully compare experiment with theory – and create protocols and metrics to show when this works and when it doesn’t And, during the process, we’ll certain discover some experimental errors in the structures. We’ll be making the results Open, of course.
If we are going to scrape the web (rather than simply re-index existing collections) we’ll need OSCAR. This will be new information – compounds extracted from free text. Of course we’ll have to be careful not to violate copyright, but if we start with a few million Pubmed abstracts that should do for a start

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Another publisher catch-22?

Posted on April 24, 2007 by pm286

I had a really enjoyable day at Colorado State University yesterday – making a videocast and then giving a hyperpresentation which ranged from repositories to the growing destructive power of organised publishing. At drinks afterwards I made the usual suggestion – “if we all stopped taking closed access journals the publishers would have to toe the line?”
And the librarians at CSU hit me with a terrifying gotcha. Apparently it applies to more than one publisher – and necessarily learned societies also.
The learned societies are not only member-organisations, quasi-commercial publishers and keepers of the discipline (a worthy role), but also provide accreditation for courses. This is, of course, highly worthy in itself and an useful way of accrediting schools which are, perhaps, not large enough to run their own course reviews. (I am not sure how much this varies from country to country).
BUT the society as part of its accreditation service requires that the college take certain journals and use certain information products which happen to be supplied by the society. If the college removes its subscriptions, then the society refuses to accredit the courses.
If I have got this right it is terrible. In commercial circles it would either be outlawed or highly regulated with chinese walls. But this seems like a monopoly where the publisher (sorry, society) can insist on a college buying highly-priced journals and information products and services.
Please tell me this isn’t so.

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Kick-off time for Open Useful Chemistry

Posted on April 24, 2007 by pm286

Jean-Claude has started his Open Chemistry experiment (in both senses – chemistry and Open). He will record everything on the Wiki and then – presumably when there is some publishable “golden moment” send the manuscript off.

I am floating the idea of a repository which manages the actual versioning of the manuscript. Hopefully we can put together something that supports JC. For the experimental we should be capturing material now, of course, though the technology is a bit young. There is also no reason why we shouldn’t start the M?S now as well.
If the paper is accepted the software should then remember the original author manuscript so that when the final PDF appears it can be liberated to the world. Of course this would be largely ritual as we would already have seen all the previous versions!!!
=== JC ===
Wiki Paper Experiment Started

Although we still have a few loose ends to tie up, I started writing up our work on the Ugi reaction on the wiki. So far I have abstract up.

Anatomy of the Ugi Reaction and Attempted Cyclization to Diketopiperazines
Abstract
Reaction profiling using H NMR spectroscopy was used to elucidate the kinetics and progression of the 4-component Ugi reaction, involving an aldehyde, an amine, a carboxylic acid and an isonitrile. Aromatic aldehydes such as benzaldehyde, veratraldehyde and piperonal were found to react smoothly with 5-methylfurfurylamine and t-butylamine to yield imines in methanol. Phenylacetaldehyde led to intractable (product mixtures within minutes of adding to the amine component. The addition of boc-gly alone led to a reversal of the imine formation, while the addition of boc-gly with t-butyl isonitrile or benzyl isonitrile led to a more limited reversal to the aldehyde that peaked after about 30 min before diminishing again over several days. The Ugi products started to crystallize within hours or days. 2-morpholinoethyl isonitrile did not generate Ugi products, apparently due to its instability in the presence of boc-gly.

The experiment will consist in seeing which chemistry publishers will accept a paper written on a public wiki and the use of links to experiment pages on a laboratory notebook wiki as valid references. As I learned from a talk by one our librarians Jane Bryan a few weeks ago, publishers are really becoming tolerant of pre-prints hosted on institutional repositories. This is really not that different.
Who knows – it might even work for an ACS journal. We’ll see.
And in the meantime, feedback is welcome on the drafts.
(Note that Alicia also started writing her Masters Thesis on the wiki.)

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The monkeys and the ChemZoo

Posted on April 24, 2007 by pm286

David Bradley alerted me to Chemspider, an engine which scrapes the web for information on chemical compound information and calculates properties. I blogged yesterday about what it did for sodium chloride.
I am slightly sorry to do this as I have had some acquaintance with the people involved, but I cannot let garbage science go uncommented. That is what peer-review is about. And it can be painful.
Fom the Chemspider website:

ACD/Labs Software Integrated into ChemSpider Service
Partnership brings predicted logP property values and systematic nomenclature identifiers to over 10 million chemical structures online, to support ChemZoo’s vision of creating a chemical community.
RALEIGH, North Carolina, and TORONTO, Canada, April 10, 2007—ChemZoo and Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., (ACD/Labs) announced a collaboration that will allow integration of a number of ACD/Labs software tools to the ChemSpider service, a new online chemistry database and property prediction service provider. ACD/Labs properties will be generated and published for over 10 million chemical structures using some components of the ACD/Labs PhysChem and Nomenclature software suites.

From what I can see the spider scrapes information and passes it to the Zoo. The Zoo is filled with monkeys. (The same monkeys who are trying to write Shakespeare by hitting typewriter keys at random). The monkeys seem to be using ACD Lab software to calculate properties. ACD software has been around for several years and I suppose it gets some answers right but it doesn’t do very well on calcium carbonate. Here’s the entry:

0953    Chemical Structure    CCaO3
Molecular Weight 62.02
logP -0.809
hydrogen bond donors    2

Well, they got the chemical formula right. Calcium carbonate is marble, limestone, chalk. It’s hard and doesn’t dissolve in water. You calculate its molecular weight as follows:
Ca=40 + C=12 + 3 (O=16)
and your child will tell you that it comes to 100. (I’ve missed the decimal point). The monkeys only get to 62 before they give up. I have no idea how they get this. The monkeys also tell us how many hydrogen atoms can be used to bind to other molecules. I can’t see any hydrogen atoms, nor can you but the monkeys found 2.
Why am I so angry about this? Because NIST and NMRShiftDB and Joe Townsend and Nick Day work very hard at calculating molecular properties. Volker Thome in our lab has spent years calculating the properties of calcite. They are trying to show that data quality matters. The ChemZoo monkeys are destroying the value of chemical data.
There are ways of calculating molecular properties properly – it’s hard work, takes care and only applies to certain compounds. It’s hard measuring the properties – that’s what NIST does. If the spider extracted the data from NIST without their permission then it has broken copyright. And I hope NIST gets them to remove the data. It’s harder with NMRShiftDB – as a Blue Obelisk member we make our data Open for any reasonable re-use.
But giving it to the ChemMonkeys is not reasonable. The zoo should close.

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Aggregated chemistry and quality

Posted on April 24, 2007 by pm286

David Bradley wrote:

Peter, great to see that WWMM is starting to gain some momentum. I certainly think there are various behavioural properties of chemists that have held many back from taking part in blogs and wikis and general web 2.0 type stuff. But, I interviewed Steve Bachrach for Reactive Reports and he admits to having been reluctant to get involved but has now recognised (through reading your blog) that there is value in these technologies and is soon to start his own. The interview is here
Meanwhile, I take it you saw the launch of the chemistry database search tool ChemSpider.com, which the developers reckon could provide a one-stop shop for chemistry database searching (pubchem, chebi, academic, NFP, and commercial). It’s got 10million+ entries so far, but I think they’re adding to it all the time. (I have to confess an interest here, as they gave me some webspace to host a new chemistry blog – Spinneret)
db

I didn’t see the launch, so I had a look, and typed “Sodium chloride”. I got three entries, one of which (formatting removed) was:

Structure    Properties
Cl2Na2     ChemSpider ID:     5290429
Molecular Formula:     Cl2Na2
Molecular Weight:     22.99
Nominal Mass:     23 Da
Average Mass:     22.9892 Da
Monoisotopic Mass:     22.989221 Da
ACD/Name (IUPAC):
ACD/Name (Index):
SMILES:     [Na+].[Na+].[Cl-].[Cl-]
InChI:     InChI=1/2ClH.2Na/h2*1H;;/q;;2*+1/p-2/f2Cl.2Na/h2*1h;;/q2*-1;2m
Data Source(s):
Names, Database IDs and Synonyms:     sodium chloride; (NaCl)2

This is rubbish.
There is little point in collecting 10 million structures if you cannot rely on any of them. It actually detracts from the hard work of people like Stefan, Christoph and others on NMRShiftDB as the general user of the database will judge all entries by the lowest common denominator.
There are two modern ways to ensure quality in large robotically created collections.

use robot heuristics to validate quality. This is what Nick Day does in crystaleye. The quality of the entries is potentially superior to the published structures.
use social computing. This is what Wikipedia does. It has 23,000 chemical entries. Brilliant.

So my solution would not be to proliferate substandard aggregators, but to concentrate on robotic and social annotation of Pubchem. Pubchem is essentially a linkbase onto which the robotosphere and the blogosphere can layer annotations. So we can create standoff annotation of resources such as CrystalEye and Pubchem which the community and its robots can annotate. They are both Open Data – can be completely downloaded – and are ideal starting points around which to create the Open chemosphere.

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petermr's blog

Corrections and Retractions from the GreaseMonkey

Sanctity of the scientific record

Supporting Information Available

“Socialized Science” (ACS[*] commentary on NIH)

Centralisation or Federation?

Alpha and beta

Comments from chemspider

World Wide Molecular Matrix, Pubchem, quality metrics, etc.

Another publisher catch-22?

Kick-off time for Open Useful Chemistry

Jean-Claude has started his Open Chemistry experiment (in both senses – chemistry and Open). He will record everything on the Wiki and then – presumably when there is some publishable “golden moment” send the manuscript off.

The monkeys and the ChemZoo

Aggregated chemistry and quality

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