[Molvis-list] Chemistry For All (Nature, Murray-Rust)

[Eric Martz]

Higly recommended, in the current issue of Nature 
(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7179/full/451648a.html ): 
Peter Murray-Rust's ambitious and inspiring vision of the future of 
free exchange of, and wide access to scientific information, 
particularly in chemistry. The "emerging world of e-science or 
cyberscholarship" which "seeks to develop the tools, content, and 
social attitudes to support multidisciplinary, collaborative 
science". Many fascinating and promising initiatives are mentioned, 
including Blue Obelisk (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16711717 ) 
(http://blueobelisk.org ), an on-line community that encourages 
openness in chemistry, and the Jmol community. The article includes a 
screenshot of Jmol within the CrystalEye resource 
(http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye/ ), which provides open data 
(http://www.opendefinition.org/ ) for crystallographic information 
and coordinates on chemical compounds. A number of exciting projects 
are mentioned, including DBpedia, greasemonkey, and the Nature 
Publishing Group-provided discussion forums for open science in the 
virtual reality world Second Life.



----
Eric Martz, Professor Emeritus, Dept Microbiology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA US
http://www.umass.edu/molvis/martz