Depth-First: Tag blogs

Open Access Business Models That Can Actually Work: Sigma-Aldrich's ChemBlogs

Rich Apodaca — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:49:00 +0000

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

Open Notebook Science Using InChIMatic

Rich Apodaca — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:27:00 +0000

Have you ever wanted to find a molecule on the Web using your favorite search engine in combination with a 2-D structure editor? InChIMatic is a service that lets you do just that. In this article, I'll show how InChIMatic can be used to look up molecules in the UsefulChem-Molecules blog.

For those who aren't familiar with it, UsefulChem-Molecules is a blog operated by Jean-Claude Bradly's research group at Drexel University that publicly archives molecules of interest. Each entry is a single molecule that may be linked to other Web resources.

Let's say you wanted to look up dithranol. This can be done by simply pointing your browser to inchimatic.com and drawing the structure:

When you're finished, select your search engine of choice (we'll use Google here) and press "Search". You'll be taken to the familiar results page. The second result links to the UsefulChem-Molecules entry for dithranol.

In performing this simple workflow, I noticed areas for improvement in both UsefulChem and InChIMatic:

UsefulChem If you look at the entry for dithranol, you'll notice there are no linkouts. In essence, the entry is a bookmark without context. Although it's useful to know that the Bradly group is interested in this molecule, it would be even more interesting to know in what context. Each entry should contain at least one link giving the molecule a context.
InChIMatic Using the back button on the Google results page takes you back to InChIMatic, but your molecule is gone. If you wanted to look for a series of related molecules, you couldn't edit your existing structure. As Firefly 1.0 nears completion, a top priority will be to incorporate it into InChIMatic and fix the back-button problem.

As you can see, between InChIMatic and UsefulChem-Molecules, we have the makings of a crude laboratory information management system. The problem is we're trying to use existing tools (search engines and blogs) for purposes they are ill-suited for. It can work, but it could also work much better.

What chemistry really needs is open, user-friendly systems specifically designed to archive and search chemical information of the type maintained by the Bradly group. But that's a story for another time.

The Scientific Debate: Digg Meets Science?

Rich Apodaca — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:00:00 +0000

Recently I stumbled upon a new service called The Scientific Debate by way of a comment on Derek Low's blog In the Pipeline. It's actually a very clever idea: think Digg for biology papers. Business seems to be slow right now, but the site is less than one month old.

Would something like this work in Chemistry? Sites like Postgenomic Chemistry and Chemical Blogspace already provide an intriguing window into what scientists themselves think of their literature. The blogs (and their numerous comments) demonstrate the willingness of large numbers of scientists to do this kind of work for free - not unlike CAS's long-gone all-volunteer abstracter department. Given that submitting a paper to a Digg-like site and offering a few sentences is much faster than writing a blog, maybe the idea would catch on if done right.

The (Chemical Information) World is Flat

Rich Apodaca — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 16:24:00 +0000

Certainly the need to extract chemical and physical data from the literature, as contrasted with bibliographic information, will increase. The new breed of chemical information specialists will not only have to be trained in information storage and retrieval but also in writing and digesting information - what is otherwise called reviewing. ...

Where are all the new chemical information specialists going to come from? Many of them will be people who start out in a career path in information science. But most will be Ph.D. chemists who will turn to information science as an alternative career in a tough job market. They will be no different than the many chemists who wound up as chemical marketing specialists back in the depression.

-Eugene Garfield, J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 1978, 18, 1-4

Thirty years may have passed, but the situation described by Garfield rings eerily familiar today. What could not have been anticipated is the degree to which the playing field for information producers is being flattened. Today's scientist-reviewer employs many of the same tools, accesses the same distribution channels, and eventually will compete for the same readers as established journals, databases, and other services.

For example, consider the sharp increase in the number of chemistry-related blogs within the last year. Although the underlying technologies are woefully ill-suited to the job, a groundswell of both writers and readers for this type of scientific communication has been exposed.

How far out can this trend be extrapolated? Garfield has argued that "in the future, it would be more and more difficult to distinguish (ordinary) laboratory scientists from information specialists." Looking back at the last thirty years, there is ample evidence to support this claim for information consumers and producers alike. How well are you and your organization positioned to thrive in the flat chemical information world that lies ahead?