From: Thanasis Gimisis (gimisis$##$area.bo.cnr.it)
Date: Thu May 25 2000 - 12:48:09 EDT
I think that the list has touched one of the most important current
topics in the subject of free dissemination of chemical information.
Why Chemists can't do what physicists have been doing for all this time?
The Physics preprint archive that Eugene Leitl mentioned is the proof
of success of an article preprint and why not a structure and spectra
database which can be built directly from us, direct providers and
users of chemical information, circumventing specific Chemical
Societies or Publishing Companies.
The idea of a preprint server which receives chemical information in
a convenient format for archiving can co-exist with the current
status of variable-impact hard-copy journals and as Henry Rezpa has
put it possible formats already have been proposed. All that is
required is an extra effort from our part to transform an article to
such a format. I think that if the procedure is kept simple and
software or templates are constructed to aid this transformation it
will be adopted by a large number of researchers in the long run.
>Eugene Leitl writes:
>
>The chemical society as a whole has allowed this to happen, by
>tolerating the status quo for years, despite existiance of essentially
>zero-cost publishing on the web. (For instance, consider the
>electronical preprint archive for the physical community at
>http://xxx.lanl.gov )
>
>... a globally accepted open/noncommercial expandable
>document publishing standard has to be defined (inasmuch chemical XML
>doesn't qualify already), which has to have means of intelligent full
>text, structure (unique SMILES or graphs) and (IR, MS, NMR) spectre
>searching. These standards have to be implemented in OpenSource
>software, putting the development into the hands of the users. All
>this is not exactly rocket science so far.
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