Henry Rzepa's Blog

The World-Wide-Web is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary; you can get the T-shirt in the CERN visitor centre!  Five years on, in May 1994, the first Web conference took place (WWW94) at CERN and now celebrating its own 25th anniversary. That 1994 conference also had various break-out sessions, one of which summarised the state of chemistry on the web at the time. You can see my general but entirely personal impressions written after the workshop (DOI: 10.14469/hpc/5850), with a chemistry specific version at DOI: 10.14469/hpc/5851.  A real trip down memory lane and an indication of how much has happened in 25 years!

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In August 2016, the launch of a chemistry pre-print service ChemRxiv was announced. I was phoned a day or so later by a staff journalist at C&E News for my opinion. The only comment that was retained for their report was my instantaneous feeling that “the community needed a chemistry pre-print server like one needed a hole in the head“. I had been there before you see, recollecting a pre-print server launched by the ChemWeb service around 1996 or 1997 and which lasted only about two years before being withdrawn due to the low quality of the preprints. So what do I think of ChemRxiv now in 2019?

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This is a follow up to my earlier post about C⩸N⁺, itself inspired by this ChemRxiv pre-print[1] which describes a chemical synthesis of singlet biradicaloid C₂ and its proposed identification as such by chemical trapping.

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References

1. K. Miyamoto, S. Narita, Y. Masumoto, T. Hashishin, M. Kimura, M. Ochiai, and M. Uchiyama, "Room-Temperature Chemical Synthesis of C2", 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.8009633.v1