Posts Tagged ‘United Kingdom’
Friday, December 11th, 2015
You might have noticed the occasional reference here to the upcoming centenary of the publication of Gilbert N. Lewis’ famous article entitled “The atom and the molecule“.[1] A symposium exploring his scientific impact and legacy will be held in London on March 23, 2016, exactly 70 years to the day since his death. A list of the speakers and their titles is shown below; there is no attendance fee, but you must register as per the instructions below.
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References
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G.N. Lewis, "THE ATOM AND THE MOLECULE.", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 38, pp. 762-785, 1916. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja02261a002
Tags:Alan Dronsfield, Clark Landis, Durham, France, Gilbert N. Lewis, Interesting chemistry, John Nicholson, Julia Contreras-Garcia, Liverpool, London, Michael Mingos, Nick Greeves, organic chemist, Oxford, Patrick Coffey, professor, Robin Hendry, Royal Society of Chemistry Historical Group, United Kingdom, United States
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Saturday, June 20th, 2015
The university sector in the UK has quality inspections of its research outputs conducted every seven years, going by the name of REF or Research Excellence Framework. The next one is due around 2020, and already preparations are under way! Here I describe how I have interpreted one of its strictures; that all UK funded research outputs (i.e. research publications in international journals) must be made available in open unrestricted form within three months of the article being accepted for publication, or they will not be eligible for consideration in 2020.
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Tags:Academia, Academic publishing, Archival science, author, Chemical IT, Data management, Digital library, EPrints, Institutional repository, Knowledge, Knowledge representation, Library science, metadata, Open access, PDF, personal web page, Preprint, Publishing, Repository, researcher, ROMEO GREEN, Science, Technology/Internet, United Kingdom, web server
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Thursday, January 8th, 2015
About two years ago, I posted on the distribution of readership of this blog. The passage of time has increased this from 144 to 176 countries. There are apparently between 189-196 such, so not quite yet complete coverage! 
Of course, it is the nature of the beast that whilst we can track countries, very little else is known about such readerships. Is the readership young or old, student or professor, chemist or not (although I fancy the latter is less likely). Another way of keeping tabs on some of the activity are aggregators such as Chemical Blogspace, which has been rather quiet recently. Perhaps we have become too obsessed by metrics, and with the Internet-of-things apparently the “next-big-thing”, the metrics are only likely to increase. This will only encourage “game playing“, and I urge you to see a prime example of this in the UK REF (research excellence framework), the measure which attempts to rank UK universities in terms of their “excellence”.
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Tags:chemist, General, Internet-of-things, professor, United Kingdom
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Thursday, July 3rd, 2014
Increasingly, our access to scientific information is becoming a research topic in itself. Thus an analysis of big deal journal bundles[1] has attracted much interesting commentary (including one from a large scientific publisher[2]). In the UK, our funding councils have been pro-active in promoting the so-called GOLD publishing model, where the authors (aided by grants from their own institution or others) pay the perpetual up-front publication costs (more precisely the costs demanded by the publishers, which is not necessarily the same thing) so that their article is removed from the normal subscription pay wall erected by the publisher and becomes accessible to anyone. As the proportion of GOLD content increases, it was anticipated (hoped?) that the costs of accessing the remaining non-GOLD articles via a pay-walled subscription would decrease.
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References
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T.C. Bergstrom, P.N. Courant, R.P. McAfee, and M.A. Williams, "Evaluating big deal journal bundles", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111, pp. 9425-9430, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1403006111
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C. Woolston, "Secret publishing deals exposed", Nature, vol. 510, pp. 447-447, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/510447f
Tags:Chemical IT, GBP, General, typical article processing charge ranges, United Kingdom
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Wednesday, June 18th, 2014
I was reminded of this article by Michelle Francl[1], where she poses the question “What anchor values would most benefit students as they seek to hone their chemical intuition?” She gives as common examples: room temperature is 298.17K (actually 300K, but perhaps her climate is warmer than that of the UK!), the length of a carbon-carbon single bond, the atomic masses of the more common elements.
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References
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M. Francl, "Take a number", Nature Chemistry, vol. 5, pp. 725-726, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1733
Tags:/RT, chemical intuition, chemical timescale, chemical timescales, favourite chemical anchor, General, Michelle Francl, possible chemical reaction, United Kingdom
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Monday, May 5th, 2014
My name is displayed pretty prominently on this blog, but it is not always easy to find out who the real person is behind many a blog. In science, I am troubled by such anonymity. Well, a new era is about to hit us. When you come across an Internet resource, or an opinion/review of some scientific topic, I argue here that you should immediately ask: “what is its provenance?”
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Tags:0000-0002-8635-8390, added value site, API, Chemical IT, Internet resource, ORCiD, programmer, United Kingdom
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Sunday, October 13th, 2013
I reminisced about the wonderfully naive but exciting Web-period of 1993-1994. This introduced the server-log analysis to us for the first time, and hits-on-a-web-page. One of our first attempts at crowd-sourcing and analysis was to run an electronic conference in heterocyclic chemistry and to look at how the attendees visited the individual posters and presentations by analysing the server logs.
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Tags:aspiring tenure-track young scientist, author, Chemical IT, General, Google, head of department, Imperial College, research group leader, United Kingdom, Web-period
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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
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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
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R. Van Noorden, "Data-sharing: Everything on display", Nature, vol. 500, pp. 243-245, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nj7461-243a
Tags:Chemical IT, chemical tagger, data mining, datument, David Scheschkewitz, e-notebook, Google, Interesting chemistry, opendata, Peter Murray-Rust, pre-processor, researcher, scientific tool, supervisor, United Kingdom
Posted in Uncategorised | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
In a time of change, we often do not notice that Δ = ∫δ. Here I am thinking of network bandwidth, and my personal experience of it over a 46 year period.
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Tags:acoustic coupler, Addison-Wesley, Austin Texas, BT, building I, California, Cambridge, computing, electronics, ethernet, Global Intelligence, Google, Historical, Imperial College, Leeds, London, New York, operating system, quantum chemical calculations, Samuel Butler, United Kingdom, University College London
Posted in Uncategorised | 4 Comments »