Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 13, Issue 4; October 2006

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

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Chemistry publishing: Professor Robert Schrag was selling his lectures on-line, but has been asked to stop by his university while it develops a policy for this sort of intellectual property.
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Self-assembling gel stops bleeding: Professor Shuguang Zhang from MIT has developed a polypeptide which self-assembles and can stop bleeding.
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Chemical Information Sources Wiki: A Wiki is user-updateable web page. The most famous is the Wikipedia. A Chemical Information Sources Wiki is now available, based on an undergraduate course from the Indiana University Department of Chemistry by Gary Wiggins.
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Royal Society Archives on line: The Royal Society has made its archive of publications (1665 - present) available free on the web, until November 2006.
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Nomenclature and representation: The first report of the IUPAC recommendations on graphical representation standards for chemical structure diagrams, is now been available.
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Nanotechnology - good enough to eat?: Companies are interested in improving foods through the use of nanotechnology.
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Clinical Trials: ClinicalTrials.gov provides regularly updated information about clinical research in the USA. Other resources are also available, including Pharmaprojects, the Investigational Drugs Database (IDdb), Centerwatch, TrialsCentral and WebMD.
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Moves to open access: Publishers are moving towards open access publishing models. The ACS are offering 'Author Choice', the RSC are offering 'Open Science', and Wiley are offering 'funded access'. This is different to Elsevier's option of author archiving. This could mean the worst of all possible worlds, for universities. Academics have to pay to publish, and institutions still have to pay to subscribe, to obtain those articles for which authors have not been able to pay to publish. The richer research groups and institutions will increase their profile, because of their ability to pay for open access to their articles. Pharmaceutical companies, which publish little in relation to their research budgets, may benefit.
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Sensing magnetic fields: How can animals detect magnetic fields? Cryptochromes may hold the answer.
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Internet growth is stalling?: The internet cannot grow forever, and there are indications it is already slowing down (eg Chemistry on the world-wide-web: a ten year experiment. DOI: 10.1039/b409956g, even though there are now more than a hundred million websites on the internet. The web may be evolving towards web 2.0.
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Plastics abbreviations: This list of abbreviations related to plastics has 272 entries, of which some have two meanings, including ACS, CM, PA, PAEK, PB, SI, and TEEE.
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A History of the International Dyestuff Industry: The 150th anniversary of William H. Perkin's discovery of mauve is recorded by ColourClick from the Society of Dyers and Colourists