Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 12, Issue 1; January 2006

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

(1)
Open Access and the Royal Society: Forty six Fellows of the Royal Society have signed an open letter to the President expressing concern about the Society's statement on open access.
(2)
ACS meeting archive: The programmes of past American Chemical Society National Meetings are now available on-line from 1998.
(3)
Finding chemical names in papers and patents: Elsevier MDL and TEMIS have developed a method for finding chemical information in text. Chemical names are found and translated into structures. A similar facility is provided by nesC, which was developed by the Nature Publishing Group and the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics.
(4)
A study of the effects of alternative business models for scholarly journals: This study on open-access business models is published by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, which clearly has an interest in the outcome. The survey concludes that it is too early to know whether open-access approaches have a viable business model, notes that scholarly publishing is in a state of flux, and comments that peer-review may be less rigorous for open-access journals. The last of these points is the subject of an addendum, which does not make a clear case for the assertion. An Open Letter to All University Presidents and Provosts Concerning Increasingly Expensive Journals from two Californian economists, says that the symbiotic relationship between academics and publishers has broken down, and suggest charging the publishers overheads for editorial services.
(5)
DGRweb [Directory of Grad Research] now free online: DGRweb, the online version of ACS Directory of Graduate Research, is now freely available. It covers graduate research in the USA and in Canada.
(6)
Maestro free for academic users: Schrodinger's Maestro graphical user interface for its computational chemistry programs is now free for academic users.
(7)
Teragrid: Teragrid is a grid of computers run by the NSF, with over forty teraflops of computer power and over twopetabytes of storage. Research using the resource includes protein sequence analysis but does not seem to include chemistry, so far.
(8)
ChemNomParse: The ChemNomParse project is an open source project to create a chemical nomenclature parser, run by from the Computer Science Department at the University of Manchester. The library is now part of the CDK.
(9)
Fifty years of citation indexing: Current Science has a special section on citation counting, now fifty years have passed since the idea was suggested by Garfield (Science, 1955, 123, 108-111 - an article which was cited dozens of times in 2005). The Chronicle of Higher Education also has an article on impact factors, which are based on citations. These measures of excellence can be misleading.
(10)
Scientific publishing since Oldenburg: Proceedings of the meetings of the Association of Research Libraries are available on-line. The 138th meeting focussed on Creating a Digital Future, and includes an article on the history of scientific publishing starting from the time of Henry Oldenburg, who founded the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665.
(11)
OSET: Organic Synthesis Exploration Tool: The OSET project from the School of Chemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico aims to develop a Computer-Assisted Organic Synthesis (CAOS) program for use in the teaching of organic chemistry. The program may be downloaded from the website, and was last updated in 2002.
(12)
SciFinder Scholar for Mac OS X: A version of SciFinder Scholar for Mac OS X has been released.