Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 15, Issue 1; July 2007

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

(1)
Optical Structure Recognition Application: Optical Structure Recognition Application (OSRA) is a free program which converts pictures of molecules (in most common formats, including PDF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF) into SMILES. It can be downloaded or used on-line.
(2)
Copyfraud: The unfair use of copyright material is an important issue. Copyfraud, the false claim of copyright, is also a problem. In particular, factual data is not copyright (Harvard; BitLaw; Canada), although databases and assemblies of data may well be controlled by a copyright holder.
(3)
The Open Library: The Open Library is a project to build an open, free internet archive of every book every published. It has some way still to go to achieve this, but it is open for business. Is this the future of the book?
(4)
Libertas Academica: Libertas Academica publishes open access journals, including Perspectives in Medicinal Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry Insights. The latter has published seven papers so far.
(5)
Scholarly Societies: An overview of scholarly societies
(6)
CrystalEye: A database of crystal structures, gathered from web resources, containing about sixty thousand structures, and available from the Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics.
(7)
Top 500 computers: The list of the world's top 500 computers has been updated. First position is the IBM BlueGene at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is optimized to run molecular dynamics applications which look at materials aging. Since December 2005 (Chem. Inf. Lett. 2006, 13, #1, 7) the UK's top entry has moved up to number twenty-four (atomic weapons research), and the top UK academic institution, the University of Reading has thirty-sixth place. Cambridge University is now in 44th place.
(8)
Computational Organic Chemistry Blog: A computational organic chemistry blog from Professor Steven Bachrach, to accompany his book.
(9)
SOMA2: Open Source Modelling Environment: SOMA2 is a modelling environment for computational drug discovery and molecular modelling, which works through a web-browser.
(10)
Vatican library closed: This sudden announcement has only minor implications for chemistry, as the Vatican chemistry collection is small. Other routes will need to be found to access "Chemistry in Iraq and Persia in the tenth century AD" from the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Fortunately, IBM is working on the problem.
(11)
WorldWideScience: WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway-accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases. It has partners worldwide, and is run from the US Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
(12)
Theseus: THESEUS is a research program, sponsored by the German government, which aims to develop better ways of using the knowledge available on the Internet. It focuses on semantic technologies, including the automatic generation of metadata for multimedia files, and looks forward to Web 3.0. It is not, therefore, a direct competitor to Google, and has more similarities to Quaero, but search-engines in their current forms will be made obsolete by this technology.