C&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.
Archive for the ‘Chemical IT’ Category
How FAIR are the data associated with the 2017 Molecules-of-the-Year?
Wednesday, March 7th, 2018First, 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.
Accessing (raw) chemical data: a peek into the CIF format.
Friday, July 21st, 2017There is much focus at the moment on how to ensure experimental replicability in e.g. the molecular sciences. An important aspect of that is having access to FAIR data; data which is findable, accessible, inter-operable and re-usable. One of the “gold standards” in chemistry is the data associated with crystal structures. Here I take an inside peek into the standard file-type for carrying crystal structure data, the CIF file (the Crystallographic Information File).
How to search data repositories for FAIR chemical content and data: SubjectScheme
Thursday, June 8th, 2017As data repositories start to flourish, it is reasonable to ask questions such as what sort of chemistry can be found there and how can I find it? Here I give an updated[1] worked example of a digital repository search for chemical content and also pose an important issue for the chemistry domain.
References
- H.S. Rzepa, A. Mclean, and M.J. Harvey, "InChI As a Research Data Management Tool", Chemistry International, vol. 38, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ci-2016-3-408
FAIR Research data: Gravitational waves as an example from the astrophysics community.
Friday, June 2nd, 2017In 2016, the world heard that gravitational waves had been detected and now a third instance is reported.‡ Given that the data associated with these detections are perhaps amongst the most important instances in recent times, I thought I might take a peek at how it was managed.
