Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 8, Issue 3; March 2004

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

The Berne Convention is an agreement that data cannot be protected by copyright. The USA is considering new legislation which will change this. The Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act will create new ownership rights. The SIIA (Software and Information Industry Association) is in favour. The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) has had a poll of membership and concluded this is unnecessary. The NetCoalition and the National Academies are also opposed.

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RDF and OWL Recommendations

The World Wide Web Consortium has announced final approval of two key technologies, the revised Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This is likely to be an important step in the development of XML Feb 2004 and the Semantic Web. A new MicroSoft patent appears to cover some software implementations of XML, but not the XML standard itself.

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Center for Scientific Review [CSR]

The CSR organizes the peer review groups that evaluate about seventy per cent of the research grant applications sent to NIH. The organization of the review groups has been adjusted.

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PubMed Central Back issue scanning

PubMed Central is scanning the back issues of PMC journals that are not already and these will be available free. These include Nucleic Acids Research and PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

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Journal of Biological Chemistry

Almost a century of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) is freely available, 1905-2003, in addition to the current calendar. The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) has an Open Access statement.

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ACS archiving policies

Professor Richard Armstrong, the new editor of Biochemistry, has commented on ACS archiving policies. The ACS does not have a free, publicly accessible electronic archives policy, and Professor Armstrong says that this will erode the impact of ACS journals.

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Academic Publisher Mergers

An analysis of the academic publishing industry from Northern Illinois Associate Dean for Collections and Technical Services Mary H Munroe.

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Biointeraction

BioInteraction tries to map all the protein interactions for biological scientists. Features include PSIMAP, the first global interactome map.

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Computational biology at Sloan-Kettering

Computational Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) hosts BioPAX : Biological Pathways Exchange.

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SMILES to GIF

Daylight provides an on-line service which converts SMILES strings to GIF images of molecules. A similar service is available from Erlangen (see also Xemistry for academic downloads).

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Various Informatics

Buffalo Informatics: The University of Buffalo has an informatics department, which concentrates on the intersection of human communication and information processes.

Irvine Informatics: a part of the computer science department, studying the design, application, use, and impacts of information technology

Museum Informatics: This project at the University of California, Berkeley is a collaborative effort to coordinate the application of information technology in museums.

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How many compounds in CAS?

This page gives the latest number - currently around twenty three million organic and inorganic substances.