I love experiments where the insight-to-time-taken ratio is high. This one pertains to exploring the coordination chemistry of the transition metal region of the periodic table; specifically the tetra-coordination of the series headed by Mn-Ni. Is the geometry tetrahedral, square planar, or other? One can get a statistical answer in about ten minutes. The (CCDC database) search definition required is shown above.

OK, you have to be British to understand the pun in the title, a famous comedy skit about four candles. Back to science, and my mention of some crystal data now having a DOI in the previous post. I thought it might be fun to replicate the contents of one of my ACS slides here. Firstly, a DOI is one implementation of a more generic (and quite old) concept known as a Handle. This is one form of a persistent digital identifier.

I have mentioned the Amsterdam manifesto before on these pages. It is worth repeating the eight simple principles: Data should be considered citable products of research. Such data should be held in persistent public repositories. If a publication is based on data not included with the article, those data should be cited in the publication.

This is one of those topics that seems to crop up every three years or so. Since then, new versions of operating systems, new versions of programs, mobile devices and perhaps some progress?  Right, I will briefly recapitulate. Chemical structure diagrams are special; they contain chemical semantics (what an atom is, what a bond is, stereochemistry, charges, etc). One needs special programs to represent this. Take two well-known ones.

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-pag e. 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.

In 1993-1994, when the Web (synonymous in most minds now with the Internet) was still young, the pace of progress was so rapid that some wag worked out that one “ web-year ” was like a dog-year, worth about 7 years of normal human time. So in this respect, 1994 is now some 133 web-years ago. Long enough for an archaeological excavation.

In the two-publisher model I proposed a post or so back, I showed an example of how data can be incorporated (transcluded) into the story narrative of a scientific article, with both that story and the data each having their own independently citable reference (using a doi for the citation). Here I take it a step further, by publishing a functional procedure in a digital repository[cite]10.6084/m9.figshare.811862[/cite] and

I do go on rather a lot about enabling or hyper-activating[cite]10.1039/P29950000007[/cite] data. So do others[cite]10.1038/nj7461-243a[/cite]. Why is sharing data important? Reproducibility is a cornerstone in science, To achieve this, it is important that scientific research be open and transparent. Openly available research data is central to achieving this.

The Amsterdam manifesto espouses the principles of citable open data.

The title of this post summarises the contents of a new molecular database: www.molecularspace.org[cite]10.1021/jz200866s[/cite] 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