Open Access : "A Manifesto for Open Chemistry". Peter Murray-Rust, Henry S. Rzepa, Simon. M. Tyrrella, and Y. Zhanga, Representation and use of Chemistry in the Global Electronic Age, a preprint forthcoming from Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. On the exciting potential of combining open access and the semantic web in chemistry. Excerpt: "Almost all of an author's output (compounds, spectra, reactions, properties, etc.) is nowadays computerised and in principle redistributable to the community for re-use. Few journals actively validate the primary data (e.g. spectra) involved in a publication (chemical crystallography being a clear expectation where data are intensively reviewed by machine). We reassert that chemists must now move towards publishing their collective knowledge in a systematic and easily accessible form for re-use and innovation....We urge that authors, funders, editors, publishers and readers move further towards the following protocol: [1] All information should be ultimately machine-understandable in XML....[2] Machine-understandable information for a compound should include a connection table, the IUPAC unique identifier (INChI) which guarantees that the connection table can be checked and regenerated, and a name....[3] Rights metadata. An explicit statement in the data that its re-use is consistent with the Budapest Open Access initiative and a requirement that this statement be preserved when the data is re-used....The main challenge is for chemists to recognise the value of making their data machine-understandable, rather than destroying it with traditional paper or slide-focused publication and dissemination processes." [Open Access News]  2:12:03 PM   [Feedback ]