Chemistry Central Blog
Chemistry Central will once again be exhibiting at the American Chemical Society National Meeting, to be held in Philadelphia 17-21 August. Come and see Jan Kuras, Lisa Prickett or me at booth 305 and enter our draw to win a pretty cool MP4 watch!
Once again energy is high on the agenda with a Presidential session on Global Energy Challenges in the 21st Century, Monday, August 18 (cosponsored by Committee on International Activities and Committee on Science) 1:30 to 5 p.m. Philadelphia Marriott, Grand Ballroom Salon F.
Several excellent sessions combine to form Chemistry for Health: Catalyzing Translational Research.
Advice is on hand from the Younger Chemists programming in the form of 3 sessions:
- Getting Your First Industrial Job
- From Test-Tube to Start-Up Companies
- Opportunities and Challenges for Non-Tenure Track Faculty
For more of a publishing bias turn to the Division of Chemical Information (CINF). Rob McFarland and Andrea Twiss-Brooks have pulled together an interesting session Preservation Issues for the Digital Library where I'm particularly looking forward to Leah Solla's presentation to find out what role a university library can play in riding the rising tide of research data.
In the Datamining and Textmining Approaches to Drug Discovery session Matthew Stahl (OpenEye Scientific Software) will present on medium throughput methods for extracting chemical information out of a number of document sources.
In the same session Igor V. Filippov (National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health) will present the latest developments of Optical Structure Recognition Application (OSRA), an open source project which has been designed to extract chemical structure images from documents such as patents and scientific publications and convert the extracted images into the computer-readable SMILES format.
Peter Johnson (University of Leeds) will cover the main problems involved with Chemical OCR
i) identification of chemical images within a document
ii) compilation of chemical graphs of individual molecules from chemical images, and
iii) interpretation of complex objects such as generic molecules and reaction schemes using the retrieved chemical graphs
while highlighting CLiDE Pro, the latest incarnation of software to emerge from the long-term CLiDE (Chemical Literature Data Extraction) project.
It should be an interesting few days.
Again, do stop by our booth (#305) to discuss open access to the chemical literature. We look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia!
Posted by Bryan Vickery at 13:00 Comments (0)
Chemistry Central to attend the 2008 Fruehjahrssymposium in Rostock
The 10th Frühjahrssymposium (young scientists conference on chemistry) takes place in Rostock, Germany, from the 27-29th of March, and Gino D'Oca, assistant editor of Chemistry Central Journal, will be presenting a poster on open access publishing and chemistry. He will be delighted to meet anyone interested in open access to chemical research or those who simply wish to know more.
Chemistry Central will also be exhibiting and speaking at the American Chemical Society's spring conference in New Orleans (6-10 of April).
Posted by Gino D'Oca at 15:12 Comments (0)
Chemistry Central Journal at the 41st IUPAC World Chemistry Congress in Turin
Naomi Jeffery and I spent last
week (5-11 August) at the 41st IUPAC World Chemistry Congress in the beautiful northern Italian city of Turin. We enjoyed
meeting many of the delegates and visitors, as well as discussing the open
access concept and Chemistry Central Journal. We also had the opportunity
to meet up with three of our editorial board members, Prof Alan Hutton, Prof
Robert Lancashire and Dr Christoph Steinbeck.
This year's
conference, whose title was 'Chemistry protecting health, natural environment
and cultural heritage', began with a drama written by 1981 Nobel Laureate Roald
Hoffman of Cornell University. The play entitled 'Should've' explored the social
responsibilities of scientists and artists, and in particular the ethical
implications of scientific research, both themes that ran through a number of other
sessions.
I found particularly interesting and thought-provoking the lecture given by Prof Ute Deichmann of the Leo
Baeck Institute, London,
entitled 'Research ethics and context: The example of biochemistry in Nazi
Germany'; a crucial look at how scientists' work and actions can have
significant and long-lasting social and political repercussions way beyond the confines of
the laboratory. The conference also included a session on 'Chemistry protecting cultural heritage', highlighting a significant area in which scientists and those interested in the arts can work together in a common cause.
Posted by Gino D'Oca at 15:34 Comments (0)
Visit Chemistry Central at the 41st IUPAC World Chemistry Congress
The 41st IUPAC World Chemistry Congress takes place in Turin, Italy, 5-11 August - and Chemistry Central will be exhibiting. If you are planning to attend the event please stop by Booth 16 and meet Gino D'Oca and Naomi Jeffery.
Robert Lancashire, Editorial Board Member for Chemistry Central Journal, will make a presentation on Monday 5 August entitled "Visualization
of spectra with JSpecView, a Java based spectroscopy viewer", 18:00-18:20.
We will also be at the American Chemical Society National Meeting in Boston, later in August.
Posted by Bryan Vickery at 14:01 Comments (0)
Professor Anna Maria Papini (University of Florence, Italy), Chemistry Central Journal Section Editor for Biomacromolecules, Chemical Biology and Chemical Methods is the chairperson of the 4th EuroCombi and 1st International Symposium on Combinatorial Sciences in Biology, Chemistry, Catalysts and Materials. The event will take place July 15-18 2007 in Florence.
Posted by Bryan Vickery at 13:18 Comments (0)
It's time for the ACS National Meeting - back to Chicago!
The 233rd ACS National Meeting takes place March 23-29 - so it's back to Chicago! Hopefully not with unexpected nights in Washington DC and Boston, and hopefully with my luggage this time.
Chemistry Central and Chemistry Central Journal will be exhibiting for the 1st time, if you're at the show do try to stop by our booth (226) and speak to Grace and I about open access for chemistry.
There's a lot of intersting stuff in the technical program, here I highlight a few of the sessions I'll be attending.
[Read More]
Posted by Bryan Vickery at 11:28 Comments (0)
Pittcon: 25 February - 2 March 2007
You know, it's been ages since I've been to Chicago - and then Pittcon and the American Chemistry Society (ACS) both hold their meetings in the Windy City within a month of each other! I hope they realise it's been a very mild winter here in the UK - and the temperature in Chicago right now doesn't seem at all appealing. But more on weather later...
The 58th Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (to give it it's full name) will take place 25 February to 2 March, at McCormick Place and I expect the expo to be as huge as ever. This year I think I'll take a pedometer and let you know just how far I've walked around the hall.
The "unseasonably warm summer/winter" the UK has recently experienced, and the emerging news this week of further "terror arrests" in Birmingham highlight two major challenges for Britain and the world. In these uncertain times two tracks in the conference program stand out. On Wednesday 28th, Barbara Jones and Laurie Locascio from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will chair a session on The Science of Global Climate Change (PDF). Also on Wednesday, Michael Sailor, University of California, San Diego will chair a session on Detection of Terrorist Weapons: Chemical Weapons (PDF). The technical challenges are at the forefront of both analytical and bioanalytical chemistries and will require the application of the most sensitive methods of analysis available today as well as new innovations.
I'll be attending the meeting representing Chemistry Central and BioMed Central. If you would like to discuss open access to scientific literature or are interested in playing an active role with any of our journals please drop me a line.
Posted by Bryan Vickery at 14:50 Comments (0)