A gem of a chemistry blog has been operating for some time - apparently without much notice. ChemBlogs is Sigma-Aldrich's Web answer to their Aldrichimica Acta print magazine, and it's packed with mini-reviews on synthetic chemistry with links to the primary literature. This approach to scientific marketing has so much potential, I can't imagine why others aren't doing it.

Nevertheless, there are some small things that could be done to make ChemBlogs a lot more effective. Here, in no particular order, are some suggestions:

• Submit the RSS feed to Chemical Blogspace. Chemical Blogspace is perhaps the most widely-read aggregator of free chemistry content on the Web. And it's one of the best ways to get your chemistry blog noticed, bookmarked, and linked to.

• Make it easier to discover and use a post's permalink. If I see an article I like in ChemBlogs, such as this one on gold catalysis, there's no obvious way for me to link to it in my own blog. Standard practice is that all titles on the front page are hyperlinked to the article's permalink. This article discusses the importance of permalinks.

• Don't moderate comments - use reCAPTCHA instead. Nothing stifles online discussion like moderated comments. The Web is about immediacy. Make a change and see it live instantly. Everything else is so 1999. If spam is the concern, reCAPTCHA is a wonderful tool for the job.

• Drop the company group when identifying authors. No reader cares whether Sharbil J. Firsan is part of the Marketing Group or not. In fact, it's a bit of a turn-off to have the word "Marketing" appear at all.

• Each author should have an online bio that links to their name. Although titles and company divisions are not useful, other information about authors is. In a multi-author blog like ChemBlogs, the byline should hyperlink to a bio of the author, or a collection of their writing. This makes it easier for readers to follow authors they like.

• Link to the primary literature via DOI. ChemBlogs cites many articles appearing in journals, which is a great thing. Unfortunately, there's no way for a search engine to know that this is happening. The simple fix is to hyperlink a literature citation to the DOI entry, like this one for Chem. Rev. 1994, 94, 2483-2547.

• Include InChIs for all important structures. Free tools like InChIMatic can then be used to quickly find articles dealing with those molecules.

• Post more frequently and/or regularly. More content means more eyeballs. When it's regularly posted, readers know when to expect it.

• Invite some working scientists to write articles. If recent experience with Wikipedia and Chemistry is any guide, there are plenty of capable scientist more than willing to create free, high-quality compound monographs and other chemical content. Invite some of them to contribute very short articles for ChemBlogs in their area of expertise and see what happens.

• Release all content under a Creative Commons License. Information wants to be free - why not make it free? Allowing ChemBlogs' content to spread far and wide just makes it that much more visible. For example, at last count, Depth-First content was reproduced on about a dozen other Web sites, including one in Korean. This matches my goals exactly, and it's all perfectly legal thanks to the way the content is licensed.

With a little tweaking, Sigma-Aldrich's experiment in Permission Marketing could pay off - for everyone. Readers would conveniently get useful bits of information to make them more productive. The Internet would get new, high-quality chemical content - free to use and link to. Who knows - this might even become an Open Access business model that actually works.

And Sigma-Aldrich would have a far more effective marketing tool than anything else they currently use. With the possible exception of the Handbook, but even that could change.

Image Credit: angela7

Yale University has ended it's financial support of BioMed Central's Open Access Membership program effective July 27, 2007. Under the program, Yale libraries paid an annual fee to cover the costs of submissions by Yale authors to BioMed Central (BMC) open access journals. Yale authors can continue to submit manuscripts to BMC, but must pay for all charges themselves.

According to the August 3, 2007 statement by Yale,

... Starting with 2005, BioMed Central page charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of page charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The page charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional page charges in submission.

As we deal with unprecedented increases in electronic resources, we have had to make hard choices about which resources to keep. At this point we can no longer afford to support the BioMedCentral model.

Apparently, Yale is not alone in its decision. In a refreshing act of openness, BMC lists both current members and former members. A surprisingly large number of universities have canceled their memberships, including over 80 in the United States alone. In effect, these cancellations represent a version of the journal deadpool, but in reverse.

Cost increases pose a real threat to the viability of scientific publication. Journals rely heavily on network effects to attract readers, authors, citations, and ultimately, subscribers. A journal can remain viable for some time in the face of canceled subscriptions. But each cancellation brings a journal that much closer to destroying its network, its only real value.

Open access by itself doesn't solve scientific publishing's most serious problem - it simply changes the paths through which ever-increasing sums of money flow.

Thanks to Wendy Warr for her alert on this story posted to the CHMINF-L mailing list.

Making a name for yourself in science is no easy job. Aside from the technical challenge of doing noteworthy science while working under constraints, there's the compounding challenge of making your work known to influential colleagues. Excellent work done in a vacuum is lost to science, only to be "rediscovered" by those more willing or capable of self-promotion. Look around at the most successful scientists in your field, and you'll find that they are both extraordinarily adept at doing noteworthy science and in promoting their work.

Scientists have been using the scientific publication system for hundreds of years as a channel for promoting their work. For a variety of reasons, this system is now breaking down before our eyes. There are many reasons - consider these:

• The printed page doesn't matter anymore. Old-guard scientific publishers have been able to prosper by acting as gatekeepers of a precious resource: the printed page. The arrival of immediate, ultra-cheap, ubiquitous, interactive, and persistent communication through the Internet means that printed journals are increasingly viewed as wasteful and irrelevant.

• Printed journals have priced themselves out of the marketplace. How many printed journals has your library dropped over the last year? Does your "library" even carry current printed journals anymore?

• Electronic Information wants to be free. Few things are more frustrating than knowing the answer to your question exists on a server somewhere, but you are forbidden from accessing it. Yes, you can pay $15-$30 for each article you need or get multiple subscriptions costing thousands per year, but is that any way to spend your budget?

• The minimum publishable unit is shrinking. Scientists have legitimate interests in maximizing the number of papers they publish, in minimizing their size, and in decreasing their interval. Submissions to top-tier journals continue to increase. New journals are started to catch the overflow, placing additional strain on the system's ability to find readers and "qualified" reviewers, and driving up production costs in the process.

• Too much information. How many scientific papers have you actually read, from start to finish, in the last month? How many important, relevant papers in your field could you have completely read in the last month? How many of them did you find through an automatic notification system? How many papers have you used solely for one specific piece of information they contain? How many of these papers did you find through a database of some kind?

Open Access has become a hot topic, mainly in response to the points above. Although well-intended, the debate assumes that scientific publication in the Internet age will continue to work essentially the same way it always has - with scientists submitting manuscripts to publishers who act as editors, distributors, and in many cases quality-assurance agencies.

But what if it doesn't end up working out that way?

The reason that the existing scientific publication system has flourished for hundreds of years is that it solved the fundamental problems of two key groups: (1) scientists who wanted to be informed of new developments; and (2) scientists who wanted to promote their work and careers.

If you accept this premise, then nothing prevents entirely new publication models from replacing the existing ones - provided that they solve the basic problem scientists face. If anything, the Internet is replete with examples of powerful old-guard gatekeepers of all stripes being first undermined as they denied that their business models were failing, then lashing out at everything but the root cause of their problems, and finally being driven into oblivion.

Why should old-guard scientific publishers be immune to this process?

Some scientists are discovering value in bypassing scientific publishers altogether. In chemistry, the best-known example is Jean-Claude Bradley and his group at Drexel. As Bradley's group is joined by others willing to experiment in this area, they will uncover a variety of problems that need to be addressed. Some of the most significant (at this point) include:

• tools to create content

• services that host and archive that content indefinitely

• peer-review mechanisms that fully leverage the power of collaboration over the Internet

• utilities for finding and promoting the work

These are the new high-payoff areas in scientific publication. Like all high-payoff areas, this one starts out looking dangerous or insignificant to most people.

This is not to say that that the Internet eliminates the need for gatekeepers. Instead, it creates tremendous opportunities for new gatekeepers. Google, eBay, and Wikipedia are gatekeepers. Facebook and YouTube are also gatekeepers. By all accounts, these services have done phenomenally well and will continue to flourish for some time. Significantly, each service addresses the basic need of information consumers to be informed and information producers to have their message heard. These systems have found powerful mechanisms for quality control that in many cases put the current practice of scientific peer-review to shame. And in no case will you find a business model requiring pay-per-view.

Google, eBay, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, and hundreds of other gatekeepers thrive because each has found a new precious resource to allocate, not by trying to extract every last drop of value from the old ones. Both scientific publishers and Open Access proponents would be wise to consider their example.

Image Credit: Seamus Murray

I realize that being the U.S. Government has its advantages, but the copyright notice at the bottom of a recent J. Chem. Inf. Model. paper caught my attention:

This article not subject to U.S. Copyright. Published xxxx by the American Chemical Society

As far as I can tell, this article is not part of the ACS AuthorChoice program.

In a recent interview, Peter Murray-Rust offers some very interesting comments on Open Access in chemistry. Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry remains the only widely-available Open Access option for chemical publication backed by a major publisher. With these thoughts in mind, I offer an update to my previous compilation of their statistics.