Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 10, Issue 1; January 2005

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

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Cost per article: How much does it cost to publish a paper and then have access to the results? This study looks at the library expenditure for universities in the USA, and divides it by the number of articles published in order to get an estimate. High publishing schools, such as Harvard, are, therefore, paying less per article than schools which publish less. Only a few schools pay less than a thousand dollars an article, by this measure, and most pay several thousand dollars for each article. A Cornell University Library task force study on open access publishing concludes that subscription models and open access models can coexist. However, the costs of access to the scholarly literature for Cornell would probably rise if current subscription expenditure was switched to paying for author fees for open access publishing. There is further discussion from Newcastle University
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NURSA: Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas: The aim of the program is to gather and organize information relating to orphan nuclear receptor biology, and extend this to the wider discipline of nuclear receptor signalling.
(3)
UK Freedom of information act: Under the new law, passed by Parliament in 2000, all citizens will have information to any non-exempt information from any UK public sector authority or institution.
(4)
Google Scholar: Google Scholar is an experimental Google service to search the scholarly literature. For chemistry, where most publications are not open-source, its coverage is a long way from being compehensive. Google is also digitising libraries from Harvard (FAQ) and Oxford.
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ZINC: ZINC is a free database of commercially-available compounds for virtual screening. It contains over 2.7 million compounds in ready-to-dock, 3D formats, from the Soichet laboratory at USCF, and is described in the first issue of the new Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 2005, 45, 177-182.
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Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg now has a full text search.
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International Conference on Chemical Structures: The 7th International Conference on Chemical Structures to be held June 5-9, 2005 at Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands. The conference is jointly organized by the Division of Chemical Information of the American Chemical Society (CINF), Chemical Structure Association Trust (CSA Trust), Division of Chemical Information and Computer Science of the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ), Chemistry-Information-Computer Division of the Society of German Chemists (GDCh), Royal Netherlands Chemical Society (KNCV), Chemical Information Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and the Swiss Chemical Society (SCS). The conference will cover: Cheminformatics; Structure-Activity and Structure-Property Prediction; Structure-Based Design and Virtual Screening; Analysis of Large Data Sets; and Bridging the Cheminformatics-Bioinformatics Gap.
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Some free medical publications: A group of publishers (American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Association for Cancer Research; American Cancer Society; American Diabetes Association; American Heart Association; American Medical Association; American Physiological Association; American Roentgen Ray Society; American Society of Hematology; Annals of Internal Medicine; Blackwell Publishing; BMJ Publishing Group Ltd; Elsevier; Massachusetts Medical Society; Nature Publishing Group; Oxford University Press; Society of Nuclear Medicine) is is starting a service called patientINFORM which will offer some of their publications on the web for free "to help patients and caregivers close a critical information gap". The patientINFORM web site will be launched in the spring.
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Vigjaan: Vigyaan is a free Linux-based electronic workbench for bioinformatics, computational biology and computational chemistry. The focus is currently biased towards biology rather than chemistry, and is being developed by Pratul K Agarwal of the Computational Biology Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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GPL update?: The General Public License (GPL) has not changed since version 2 in 1991, but it may be modified again to provide more protection against software patents. In a recent interview, Richard Stallman mentions the development of version 3 of the GPL. Should the license require that distributors of GLP programs should grant unhindered use of all patented technology in the program? Software patents may become even more important. India is moving towards granting software patents. The position of European software patents is being discussed by the European Union, and a decision has been postponed again.
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APS delays publication: Glenn T. Seaborg's results on nuclear fission were sent to the APS in 1941, but not published for five years. Five years later, he won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Y2K five years on: Did Y2K bug exist? This article argues that it was an important event. We should now worry about the year 2038.