Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 8, Issue 2; Feburary 2004

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

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RSC on Open Archives: Peter Gregory, the Royal Society of Chemistry's director of publishing, comments on open archive initiatives in an editorial in the final issue of Chemistry in Britain (December 2003). Should successful authors have to pay for the costs of authors whose work is rejected? Since most authors are academics, should academia subsidise industrial research?
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Roboscientist: A robot scientist has been created that creates theories, carries out experiments and interprets results. There is some way to go before graduate students, post docs and academics are made obsolete, however.
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WebFountain [IBM]: WebFountain has been developed by IBM to help companies keep up to date and respond to developments in their areas. It has three components: (i) data miners, crawlers and applications; (ii) a database of terabytes of unstructured and semi-structured data; (iii) text analysis, including natural language processing. It should be useful to businesses and to venture capitalists. More information is available from Unstructured Information Management, which reports that WebFountain suggested that petrol stations could improve sales by trying to attract police cars.
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NIST - care for your CDs: How secure is your data? The NIST have provided a guide on caring for CDs and DVDs, which recommends, amongst other things, that you should not use adhesive labels, and you should not store CDs horizontally for long periods.
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Robert Pearlman: Robert Pearlman is the Coulter R Sublett Regents Chair in Pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin, and the director of the laboratory for the development of computer-assisted drug discovery software. He is most famous for the program CONCORD (available from Tripos) which generates three-dimensional molecular structures from two-dimensional diagrams. His work has recently been the subject of a University of Texas feature.
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Household products database: This NIH resource provides safety information about materials which are used in household products.
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Office of Scientific and Technical Information - OSTI: This office, run by the Department of Energy in the USA, provides information on energy science and technology, including the E-print network (preprints and communications), DOE research reports and citations of energy research.
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Centre International de Recherche Scientifique [CIRS]: This centre is, in its own words, "the first and the most important scientific portal". Surprisingly, the Internet Archive WayBackMachine has no record of it before December 2000. The same organisation has a number of internet addresses (http://www.cirs.net/; http://www.cirs.fr/). It is an index of scientific websites, from many disciplines. It is less comprehensive for chemistry than specialised indices, such as C2K, but provides a much broader coverage of science, and so is better compared with the UK Resource Discovery Network's science sections.
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Copied Citations: According to this paper, data on misprints in citations suggests that about 70-90% of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers.
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The end of Chemistry in Britain: Chemistry in Britain, the RSC's monthly magazine for the chemical community has been replaced by Chemistry World and supported by Chemical Science, which illustrates the latest developments in chemistry from all RSC publications.
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Free web book: "Chemogenesis: The Story of How Chemical Reactivity Emerges From The Periodic Table of The Elements" by Mark R Leach, who worked at Salford University, is available on the web, and presents a personal view of chemistry. It is linked with other products available for order and not for free.
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Molecular Design Group at Trinity College Dublin: This group is run in the department of biochemistry by David Lloyd, the Hitachi Lecturer in Advanced Computing. The group's research is aimed at using molecular modelling to support the drug design process.