Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 13, Issue 2; August 2006

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

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Intute: Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, replacing PSIgate and related resources. The chemistry section contains hundreds of resources. It competes with other web pages, including ChemSpy which is a chemistry specific search tool.
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Lost in a sea of science data: There is too much data, and this is hindering the progress of science. This article describes Purdue University's development of a data repository model to tackle this. Information is distributed around the campus, and librarians produce metadata to help users find and interpret this data.
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How long does news last?: A study by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of the University of Notre Dame, and colleagues, suggests that the number of people reading news stories on the web has a half-life of only thirty-six hours (Phys. Rev. E 2006, 73, 066132, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.73.066132). The authors suggest that the results may be transferred to other web-based information sources. Purely search-based strategies for finding information are unlikely to keep up with this rate of change.
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Publish or Perish: The poem, Publish or Perish, by Steve Harnad, a proponent of Open Access, has won a prize in the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF2006) Poetry Competition.
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Solubility: Where can you find solubility data? NIST might be able to help, or the University of Alberta. Solubility is very hard to measure precisely and reproducibly.
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Directory of open access journals: This directory, run by the Lund University Libraries aims to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals. It currently lists over two thousand journals.
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USA may give up some control of the internet: It has been reported that the USA will give up some of its control over the internet, although it will keep control of the net's root zone file, at least for the moment. However, it looks as if the status quo will be maintained for the moment.
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Google hosting for open source: Google has announced it will host open-source projects as part of its Google Code developers' network.
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European Chemicals Bureau: The European Chemicals Bureau is a focal point for data and the assessment procedure on dangerous chemicals or data and the assessment procedure on dangerous chemicals. It includes ESIS (European chemical Substances Information System) which can be searched by name, formula, CAS number or by EINECS/ELINCS/EC number.
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Chemistry World: Information from the RSC's Chemistry World is now available as an RSS feed.
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InChI utilities: BKchem is a free chemical drawing program, that can create 2D structures from InChI names, without needing auxiliary information. The PubChem search facility can also be used to find structures from InChIs. An InChI can be pasted into the PubChem sketcher to create a two dimensional picture.
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Open J-Gate: Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. It currently lists 3727 open access journals, with links to over a million articles.