Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 8, Issue 4; April 2004

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

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The effect of the Internet on Nature

Nature will increase the number brief communications arising from papers by publishing additional communications on-line only. They will be citatable by their Digital Object Identifiers

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Lausanne Workshop on Chemical Information

The goal of this workshop is to bring together people interested in Chemical Information in order to share ideas and future perspectives. Speakers include Peter Ertl (Novartis, Basel) and Igor Tetko (Institute for Bioinformatics, Germany).

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Chemical Information Locator from the Internet

This resource comes from the National Centre for Biodiversity Informatics in India, which mainly focusses on Indian flora and fauna. The Chemical Information Locator is a database containing synonyms, SMILES strings and CAS numbers, linked to an interface to search engines. This approach could be a powerful tool for searching for chemical information.

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ChemWeb

Elsevier announce the transfer of ownership to ChemIndustry.com with effect from April 8, 2004.

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Mirror.ac.uk to close

The UK Mirror Service will still be available for use until July 31st 2004. JISC, which funded the service, has announced that Eduserve will take over the service. It will only offer freely available technical software resources, and no longer scholarly and academic resources.

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Alternatives to animal testing

Is animal testing of new molecules necessary? Alternative methods are being investigated by the USA agencies NIH and USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) as well as campaigning groups such as FRAME (Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments).

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Java future

Sun and Microsoft have ended a long running dispute. It is not clear what effect this will have on Java, or on a campaign to encourage Sun to make Java open source. A recent study of language performance suggests that C does not seem to have a significant performance advantage over Java.

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Crystallography Online

Crystallography Online from the International Union of Crystallography lists numerous resources including databases of interest to crystallographers.

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ACS ends publishing moratorium for trade-embargo countries

The American Chemical Society has decided to end its moratorium on publishing papers by scientists in countries under trade embargoes (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan), and joined a litigation force, should this be necessary to overturn the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ruling.

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ChemIDplus

ChemIDplus is a searchable database of over a third of a million chemical substance records. ChemIDplus Lite is also available (Help) with a simpler user interface, but no structural searching.

The NIH use ChemIDplus in some of its other resources. For example, this page on Amprenavir has a number of references to the alternative names for the drug, stored in the ChemIDplus database.

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Cambridge DSpace

Cambridge Dspace is a project to develop a digital repository for the University of Cambridge. In parallel with this, the LEADIRS project (LEarning About Digital Institutional Repositories Seminars) will promote planning for UK education institutional repositories.

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Nature Biotechnology Directory Website

A global information resource listing over eight thousand organisations, product and service providers in biotechnology.