Posts Tagged ‘opendata’

A two-publisher model for the scientific article: narrative+shared data.

Sunday, September 15th, 2013

I do go on rather a lot about enabling or hyper-activating[1] data. So do others[2]. Why is sharing data important?

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References

  1. O. Casher, G.K. Chandramohan, M.J. Hargreaves, C. Leach, P. Murray-Rust, H.S. Rzepa, R. Sayle, and B.J. Whitaker, "Hyperactive molecules and the World-Wide-Web information system", Journal of the Chemical Society, Perkin Transactions 2, pp. 7, 1995. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/P29950000007
  2. R. Van Noorden, "Data-sharing: Everything on display", Nature, vol. 500, pp. 243-245, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nj7461-243a

The Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation Principles

Wednesday, July 31st, 2013

The Amsterdam manifesto espouses the principles of citable open data. It is a short document, and it is worth re-stating its eight points here:

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150,000,000 DFT calculations on 2,300,000 compounds!

Friday, July 5th, 2013

The title of this post summarises the contents of a new molecular database: www.molecularspace.org[1] and I picked up on it by following the post by Jan Jensen at www.compchemhighlights.org (a wonderful overlay journal that tracks recent interesting articles). The molecularspace project more formally is called “The Harvard Clean Energy Project: Large-scale computational screening and design of organic photovoltaics on the world community grid“. It reminds of a 2005 project by Peter Murray-Rust et al at the same sort of concept[2] (the World-Wide-Molecular-Matrix, or WWMM[3]), although the new scale is certainly impressive. Here I report my initial experiences looking through molecularspace.org

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References

  1. J. Hachmann, R. Olivares-Amaya, S. Atahan-Evrenk, C. Amador-Bedolla, R.S. Sánchez-Carrera, A. Gold-Parker, L. Vogt, A.M. Brockway, and A. Aspuru-Guzik, "The Harvard Clean Energy Project: Large-Scale Computational Screening and Design of Organic Photovoltaics on the World Community Grid", The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, vol. 2, pp. 2241-2251, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jz200866s
  2. P. Murray-Rust, H.S. Rzepa, J.J.P. Stewart, and Y. Zhang, "A global resource for computational chemistry", Journal of Molecular Modeling, vol. 11, pp. 532-541, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00894-005-0278-1
  3. P. Murray-Rust, S.E. Adams, J. Downing, J.A. Townsend, and Y. Zhang, "The semantic architecture of the World-Wide Molecular Matrix (WWMM)", Journal of Cheminformatics, vol. 3, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-3-42

Research data and the “h-index”.

Monday, June 24th, 2013

The blog post by Rich Apodaca entitled “The Horrifying Future of Scientific Communication” is very thought provoking and well worth reading. He takes us through disruptive innovation, and how it might impact upon how scientists communicate their knowledge. One solution floated for us to ponder is that “supporting Information, combined with data mining tools, could eliminate most of the need for manuscripts in the first place“. I am going to juxtapose that suggestion on something else I recently discovered. 

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The demographics of a blog readership.

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

With metrics in science publishing controversial to say the least, I pondered whether to write about the impact/influence a science-based blog might have (never mind whether it constitutes any measure of esteem). These are all terms that feature large when an (academic) organisation undertakes a survey of its researchers’ effectiveness. WordPress (the organisation that provides the software used for this blog) recently enhanced the stats it offers for its users, and one of these caught my eye.

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Digital repositories. An update to the update.

Monday, August 13th, 2012

A third digital repository has been added to the two I described before. Chempound is a free open-source repository which (unlike DSpace and Figshare) was developed specifically for chemistry.

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Digital repositories. An update.

Saturday, July 21st, 2012

I blogged about this two years ago and thought a brief update might be in order now. To support the discussions here, I often perform calculations, and most of these are then deposited into a DSpace digital repository, along with metadata. Anyone wishing to have the full details of any calculation can retrieve these from the repository. Now in 2012, such repositories are more important than ever. 

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Science publishers (and authors) please take note.

Monday, October 24th, 2011

I have for perhaps the last 25 years been urging publishers to recognise how science publishing could and should change. My latest thoughts are published in an article entitled “The past, present and future of Scientific discourse” (DOI: 10.1186/1758-2946-3-46). Here I take two articles, one published 58 years ago and one published last year, and attempt to reinvent some aspects. You can see the result for yourself (since this journal is laudably open access, and you will not need a subscription). The article is part of a special issue, arising from a one day symposium held in January 2011 entitled “Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future” in celebration of Peter Murray-Rust’s contributions over that period (go read all 15 articles on that theme in fact!).

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(re)Use of data from chemical journals.

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

If you visit this blog you will see a scientific discourse in action. One of the commentators there notes how they would like to access some data made available in a journal article via the (still quite rare) format of an interactive table, but they are not familiar with how to handle that kind of data (file). The topic in question deals with various kinds of (chemical) data, including crystallographic information, computational modelling, and spectroscopic parameters. It could potentially deal with much more. It is indeed difficult for any one chemist to be familiar with how data is handled in such diverse areas. So I thought I would put up a short tutorial/illustration in this post of how one might go about extracting and re-using data from this one particular source.

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