...RSC Prospect has taken elements of semantic web developments —structuring documents to enable meaning to be interpreted— and applied them to the scientific content of our articles to show the possibilities of applying standard identifiers to chemicals and concepts....
Much of this work so far has been developed for academic research, developed in-house at the RSC with our partners the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics and the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge....
Essentially, the application of these concepts to publishing within RSC Prospect is to prime the pumps —we are the first publisher to use these standards, and by doing so and promoting their advantages, we hope to catalyse developments in research, to spread these developments through the publishing ecosystem, and to change the way chemical science information can be found, analysed, interpreted and reused.
All Integrative Biology articles are available free of charge (after a simple registration) and all have been enhanced with our award-winning RSC Prospect....
The RSC has used selections from the Open Biomedical Ontologies (the Gene, Sequence and Cell Ontologies, and ChEBI for chemical entities) and has also contributed to these as an active user to help increase their accuracy and relevance.
In addition we have started to build our own subject classifications covering selected areas related to our journals...The first two ontologies that we're making available are: RXNO —a reaction ontology, and CMO —a chemical methods ontology. These are freely available to download [here]....
The RSC has been an enthusiastic early adopter of the new standard for compound identifiers, the InChI, developed by IUPAC and NIST....
To underpin our commitment to the standard, RSC has sponsored the development of an InChI resolver service via ChemZoo's ChemSpider service. ChemSpider already contains over 21 million compounds, and the resolver service will allow users to look up full InChI identifiers from the shorter fixed-length InChIKey....The InChI Resolver service is also intended to allow compound deposition so that compound collections can be deposited with the service, preserving their continued access for the future. This free service will allow the community to easily use InChIs and facilitate sharing of compound collections....
Already we make associated supplementary data files available alongside our articles and we know how powerful a standard format for data can be. It becomes not just a means to preserve research data but a way to share and allow the data to be visualised and reused. The RSC is a supporter of open data and will be working to encourage authors to store and supply their research data files within their publication. We will be looking at possible standards covering areas relevant to Integrative Biology and providing demonstrations to show what can be done with the data if it is available to share in an open, standard form....
PS: Also see our past posts on the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/24/2009 03:39:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
