Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 10, Issue 5; May 2005

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

The Columbia University Senate endorsed unanimously a resolution on "Open Access" at its meeting at the beginning of April, 2005. The resolution was introduced by the Senate's Committee on Libraries and Academic Computing, and records support for the principle of open access to scholarly research, and urges the scholars of Columbia University to play a part in open-access endeavors.

(50)
Courses on chemical informatics

University and college courses in chemical informatics were surveyed in Chem. Inf. Lett. 2004, 8, #1, 12 and also in Chem. Inf. Lett. 2003, 6, #4, 46. There are now a large number of course modules on chemical informatics, but still only a few degrees.

(51)
DSpace at the Indian National Chemical Laboratory

A collection of molecules has been set up in DSPace by Dr M. Karthikeyan of the the chemoinformatics team at the National Chemical Laboratory at Pune. MolTable is a database of molecules abstracted from theses, with more soon to be incorporated. The data includes properties, molecular descriptors and spectra.

(52)
ASPET increases access to journals

The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) will make the articles in its journals The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Molecular Pharmacology, and Drug Metabolism and Disposition will be freely accessible to everybody, a year after publication.

(53)
ACS Meeting, San Diego 2005

The abstracts from 115 presentations at the CINF session in the Spring 2005 San Diego ACS meeting are available, together with some of the presentations.

(54)
Celera opens DNA database

According to Business Week, Celera will make freely available data on about thirty billion base pairs of DNA, from July 1st. This addresses concerns that Celera was not following usual methods of publication for its results.

(55)
Accessibility of crystallographic data

How accessible is crystallographic data? The Crystallography Open Database, the ecrystals project, and the RCSB make their data freely available. The CCDC does not, but it does provide free access to individual structures for research purposes.

(56)
Holding molecules

Work in the Olson laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute has developed tools to let people hold molecules with their bare hands. Are hands complicated enough to manipulate molecules?

(57)
Randomly generated papers

SCIgen is a program which generates text resembling computer science papers using random processes. Recently, a SCIgen paper was accepted by a conference. Could this be done for chemistry? The SCIgen paper falsifies some data, but ensures that it would be hard for these data to be cited and re-used. A random synthetic chemistry paper might be harder to produce in a convincing way, because so many cross-checks are possible, and can be automated.

(58)
Cyberinfrastructure

Chemical and Engineering News has a guest editorial, highlighting the importance of syberinfrastructure. The National Science Foundation has just published the report of its advisory panel on cyberinfrastructure, and its division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure has a number of programs and funding opportunities. There was a workshop on Cyber Chemistry in Washington DC at the end of last year. According to the NSF’s directors of chemistry and shared cyberinfrastructure, cyber-enabled chemistry has the potential to be transformational.

(59)
Cheminformatics Virtual Classroom

Mesa Analytics and Computing has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to build a Cheminformatics Virtual Classroom.

(60)
Dutch Digital Documents

DAREnet (English version) gives digital access to Dutch academic research output. More than 25 000 publications from two hundred scientists are featured, with about 60% full content available. The content includes chemistry, such as a page for Professor Ben Feringa.