For 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.
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.
The topic of open citations was presented at the PIDapalooza conference and represents a third component in the increasing corpus of open scientific information.
Another occasional conference report (day 1). So why is one about “persistent identifiers” important, and particularly to the chemistry domain?
FAIR 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 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.
A 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.
We 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.
There 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).
As 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.
Henry Rzepa is Emeritus Professor of Computational Chemistry at Imperial College London.
How to search data repositories for FAIR chemical content and data: SubjectScheme is licensed by Henry Rzepa under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.