A lunchtime conversation with a colleague had us both bemoaning the distorting influence on chemistry of bibliometrics, h-indices and journal impact factors, all very much a modern phenomenon of scientific publishing. Young academics on a promotion fast-track for example are apparently advised not to publish in a well-known journal devoted to organic chemistry because of its apparently “low” impact factor.
The Bürgi–Dunitz angle is one of those memes that most students of organic chemistry remember. It hypothesizes the geometry of attack of a nucleophile on a trigonal unsaturated (sp 2 ) carbon in a molecule such as ketone, aldehyde, ester, and amide carbonyl.
Blogging in chemistry remains something of a niche activity, albeit with a variety of different styles. The most common is commentary or opinion on the scientific literature or conferencing, serving to highlight what their author considers interesting or important developments. There are even metajournals that aggregate such commentaries. The question therefore occasionally arises;
Egon has reminded us that adoption of ORCID (Open researcher and collaborator ID) is gaining apace. It is a mechanism to disambiguate (a Wikipedia term!) contributions in the researcher community and to also remove much of the anonymity (where that is undesirable) that often lurks in social media sites.
The knowledge that substituents on a benzene ring direct an electrophile engaged in a ring substitution reaction according to whether they withdraw or donate electrons is very old.[cite]10.1039/CT8875100258[/cite] Introductory organic chemistry tells us that electron donating substituents promote the ortho and para positions over the meta . Here I try to recover some of this information by searching crystal structures.
Last August, I wrote about data galore , the archival of data for 133,885 (134 kilo) molecules into a repository, together with an associated data descriptor[cite]10.1038/sdata.2014.22[/cite] published in the new journal Scientific Data . Since six months is a long time in the rapidly evolving field of RDM, or research data management, I offer an update in the form of some new observations.
The title of this post refers to the site http://howopenisit.org/ which is in effect a license scraper for journal articles. In the past 2-3 years in the UK, we have been able to make use of grants to our university to pay publishers to convert our publications into Open Access (also called GOLD). I thought I might check out a few of my recent publications to see what http://howopenisit.org/ makes of them.
Derek Lowe in his In the Pipeline blog is famed for spotting unusual claims in the literature and subjecting them to analysis. This one is entitled Odd Structures, Subjected to Powerful Computations. He looks at this image below, and finds the structures represented there might be a mistake, based on his considerable experience of these kinds of molecules. I expect he had a gut feeling within seconds of seeing the diagram.
I have written earlier about the Amsterdam Manifesto. That arose out of a conference on the theme of “ beyond the PDF “, with one simple question at its heart: what can be done to liberate data from containers it was not designed to be in ? The latest meeting on this topic will happen in January 2015 as FORCE2015. The format is suitably modern, starting with a Hackathon, and then two days of talks, posters and demos.
Egon Willighagen recently gave a presentation at the RSC entitled “The Web – what is the issue” where he laments how little uptake of web technologies as a “ channel for communication of scientific knowledge and data” there is in chemistry after twenty years or more. It caused me to ponder what we were doing with the web twenty years ago.