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 ”.

A few years ago, we published an article which drew a formal analogy between chemistry and iTunes (sic )[cite]10.1021/ci060139e[/cite]. iTunes was the first really large commercial digital music library, and a feature under-the-skin was the use of meta-data to aid discoverability of any of the 10 million (26M in 2013) or so individual items in the store. ^‡ The analogy to digital chemistry and discoverability of

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. It carries more semantic information (in the form of an RDF triple declaration), which allows SPARQL queries on the entry to be performed.

A month or so ago at a workshop I was attending, a speaker included in his introductory slide a QR (Quick Response) Code. It is a feature of most digital eco-systems that there is probably already “an app for it”. So I thought I would jump on the band wagon by coding an InChI string. Here it is below: QRCode for an InChI string. Point your smart device at it, and see the InChI appear!

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.

Back in 1994, we published the crystal structure of the molecule below (X=H), a putative anti-malarial drug called halofantrine . Little did we realise that a whole area of organo catalysis based on a thiourea catalyst with a similar motif would emerge a little later. Here is how the two are connected. In our original article we described how our interest was sparked by observing the following chiral HPLC behaviour.

During the 1960s, a holy grail of synthetic chemists was to devise an efficient route to steroids. R. B. Woodward was one the chemists who undertook this challenge, starting from compounds known as dienones ( e.g. 1 ) and their mysterious conversion to phenols ( e.g. 2 or 3 ) under acidic conditions.

Sometimes, as a break from describing chemistry, I take to describing the (chemical/scientific) creations behind the (WordPress) blog system. It is fascinating how there do seem increasing signs of convergence between the blog post and the journal article. Perhaps prompted by transclusion of tools such as Jmol and LaTex into Wikis and blogs, I list the following interesting developments in both genres.

I thought I would launch the 2012 edition of this blog by writing about shared space . If you have not come across it before, it is (to quote Wikipedia), “an urban design concept aimed at integrated use of public spaces.” The BBC here in the UK ran a feature on it recently, and prominent in examples of shared space in the UK was Exhibition Road. I note this here on the blog since it is about 100m from my office.

My very first post on this blog, in 2008, was to describe how Jmol could be used to illustrate chemical themes by adding 3D models to posts. Many of my subsequent efforts have indeed invoked Jmol. I thought I might review progress since then, with a particular focus on using the new generations of mobile device that have subsequently emerged.