Linear free energy relationships (LFER) are associated with the dawn of physical organic chemistry in the late 1930s and its objectives in understanding chemical reactivity as measured by reaction rates and equilibria.
Archive for the ‘Chemical IT’ Category
Free energy relationships and their linearity: a test example.
Sunday, January 13th, 2019Re-inventing the anatomy of a research article.
Saturday, December 29th, 2018The traditional structure of the research article has been honed and perfected for over 350 years by its custodians, the publishers of scientific journals. Nowadays, for some journals at least, it might be viewed as much as a profit centre as the perfected mechanism for scientific communication. Here I take a look at the components of such articles to try to envisage its future, with the focus on molecules and chemistry.
Open Access journal publishing debates – the elephant in the room?
Sunday, November 4th, 2018For perhaps ten years now, the future of scientific publishing has been hotly debated. The traditional models are often thought to be badly broken, although convergence to a consensus of what a better model should be is not apparently close. But to my mind, much of this debate seems to miss one important point, how to publish data.
How FAIR are the data associated with the 2017 Molecules-of-the-Year?
Wednesday, March 7th, 2018C&EN has again run a vote for the 2017 Molecules of the year. Here I take a look not just at these molecules, but at how FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) the data associated with these molecules actually is.
First, Open Access, then Open (and FAIR) Data, now Open Citations.
Saturday, February 3rd, 2018The topic of open citations was presented at the PIDapalooza conference and represents a third component in the increasing corpus of open scientific information.
PIDapalooza 2018. A conference like no other!
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018Another occasional conference report (day 1). So why is one about “persistent identifiers” important, and particularly to the chemistry domain?
FAIR data ⇌ Raw data.
Thursday, December 7th, 2017FAIR data is increasingly accepted as a description of what research data should aspire to; Findable, Accessible, Inter-operable and Re-usable, with Context added by rich metadata (and also that it should be Open). But there are two sides to data, one of which is the raw data emerging from say an instrument or software simulations and the other in which some kind of model is applied to produce semi- or even fully processed/interpreted data. Here I illustrate a new example of how both kinds of data can be made to co-exist.
PIDapalooza 2018: the open festival for persistent identifiers.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2017PIDapalooza is a new forum concerned with discussing all things persistent, hence PID. You might wonder what possible interest a chemist might have in such an apparently arcane subject, but think of it in terms of how to find the proverbial needle in a haystack in a time when needles might look all very similar. Even needles need descriptions, they are not all alike and PIDs are a way of providing high quality information (metadata) about a digital object.
VSEPR Theory: Octet-busting or not with trimethyl chlorine, ClMe3.
Sunday, November 12th, 2017A few years back, I took a look at the valence-shell electron pair repulsion approach to the geometry of chlorine trifluoride, ClF3 using so-called ELF basins to locate centroids for both the covalent F-Cl bond electrons and the chlorine lone-pair electrons. Whereas the original VSEPR theory talks about five “electron pairs” totalling an octet-busting ten electrons surrounding chlorine, the electron density-based ELF approach located only ~6.8e surrounding the central chlorine and no “octet-busting”. The remaining electrons occupied fluorine lone pairs rather than the shared Cl-F regions. Here I take a look at ClMe3, as induced by the analysis of SeMe6.
Two stories about Open Peer Review (OPR), the next stage in Open Access (OA).
Thursday, October 5th, 2017We have heard a lot about OA or Open Access (of journal articles) in the last five years, often in association with the APC (Article Processing Charge) model of funding such OA availability. Rather less discussed is how the model of the peer review of these articles might also evolve into an Open environment. Here I muse about two experiences I had recently.
