Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 9, Issue 5; November 2004

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

Journals are colour-coded according to their policies on author self-archiving. There are at least two schemes for doing this:

RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open archiving)
- White: self-archiving not allowed
- Yellow: pre-print archiving permitted (pre-refereeing)
- Blue: post-print archiving permitted (final draft, post-refereeing)
- Green: pre-print and post-print archiving permitted
Hanard (Summary statistics)
- Gray: no green light to self-archiving
- Pale green: pre-print archiving permitted (pre-refereeing)
- Bright green: post-print archiving permitted (final draft, post-refereeing)

All the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals are gold, which means they are available on open-access, whereas articles in green journals are only openly available if the author chooses to make them so. Gold journals, therefore, are also green (both bright and pale) blue and yellow.

(50)
W3C Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences

This workshop ran in October 2004 in Cambridge Massachusetts. One focus of interest was the LSID (Life sciences identifier), which addresses the need for a naming schema for biological entities. This is a more ambitious aim than naming chemical entities, but Inchi may play a role in this. An archive of submissions is available.

(51)
The PGM Database

The Platinum Group Metals Database is now live. This database comprises a large collection of physical, mechanical and chemical data for platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium. Information is available on more than four hundred alloys and more than six hundred pages of related data.

(52)
Open clip art

This project aims to create an archive of clip art that can be freely used for any purpose. Currently, the archive is rather short of chemistry-related pictures, but a few are available.

(53)
RSS News Feeds for U.S. Pregrant Patent Publications

This news feeds covers the latest patent publications in the USA. There is also a Museum of Obscure Patents which profiles some surprising patent claims. It is clear that patents are not restricted by the laws of physics.

(54)
Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information

The NIH has sought public comments regarding NIH's plans to facilitate enhanced public access to NIH health related research information. The comment period is now closed. Background information is available. Donald E. Knuth has written on the crisis in scientific publishing (PDF). According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative "an old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good".

(55)
Notes on Molecular Orbital Calculations

The text book Notes on Molecular Orbital Calculations by John D. Roberts is now on the web as a PDF file. The book was published in 1961.

(56)
CrossRef

CrossRef is a collaborative, cross-publisher reference linking service that turns citations into hyperlinks, allowing researchers to navigate online literature at the article level. A group of twenty nine leading journal publishers are participating in a CrossRef Search Pilot, including the American Physical Society, Annual Reviews, Institute of Physics, IUCR, Nature, PNAS, Wiley and Oxford University Press. *Google(tm) technology* CrossRef Search has been developed by CrossRef in partnership with Google.

(57)
Open Source mathematics packages

There are many commercial mathematics packages, including Maple, Matlab and Mathematica. Open source alternatives include Maxima, Octave, Axiom, Yacas, SciLab and JACAL. There are also lower-level packages available.

(58)
MSDS

Many databases of Material Safety Data Sheets are available on-line, and some of these are free. Most have disclaimers about the limited liability of the data providers should the information turn out to be inaccurate.

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety lists the types of information that must be included in an MSDS for use in the United States, Canada or the European Union and also provides searches of free and subscription services in the CCOHS collections.
Chemexper allows easy searching of a database which has more than one hundred thousand chemicals.
Cornell University Planning Design and Construction The Planning, Design and Construction department of Cornell University maintains a database of quarter of a million MSDS sheets.
Interactive Learning Paradigms Incorporated provides a good index to Material Safety Data Sheets on the internet.
A database of International Chemical Safety Cards is available from the International Labour Organisation.
MSDS Search also provides access MSDS information resources and has a range of links to related topics including the history of MSDS and an MSDS glossary.
MSDS Solutions has a database of over one million and a half million MSDS. Free registration is required to search the database.
MSDSonline is a subscription service, but allows free sampling of its database of millions of MSDS.
Oxford university has a small database of MSDS.
The Seton Compliance Resource Center offers free access to over a third of a million MSDS from a broad range of companies and applications.
Vermont Safety Information Resources includes both safety and toxicity data.

(59)
MedLibraryAlert

MedLibraryAlert is an automated search engine that scans daily for your customized updates in the PubMed and MEDLINE databases and automatically e-mails you the results.

(60)
Applications of Cheminformatics and Chemical Modelling to Drug Discovery

This conference ran in November, and information on the talks is available on-line.