Yeah, it has been hard to miss it (see e.g. Should I join Mastodon? A scientists’ guide to Twitter’s rival). Twitter is experiencing some turbulence and Mastodon has become a very attractive, open source, community-driven, inclusive alternative. It’s been around since 2016 and there is some research literature about it already. I got my account in 2018, but did not start actively using it until earlier this year.

Forget the journal impact factor and the H-index. You want your research being used. A first approximation of that is getting cited, sure. So, with the Nobel Prize week over (congrats to all winners! the Neanderthaler prize actually helped my work in Maastricht this week), let’s figure out of you are cited by a Nobel Prize winner.

In the end it was a very simple change today (huge thanks to Nikki!), but Wikidata now escapes SMILES and CXSMILES (P10718) with the formatter URL (P1630)! That means that the link to CDK Depict now also works for SMILES (P233 and P2017) with a triple bond in it :) And because Adriano created the so far missing formatter URL for CXSMILES, it also works for lipid classes (see my post yesterday), polymers, etc :) CXSMILES for a group of

Already 3 months ago I visited Dagstuhl for the second time. The weather was much better than in the January right before the start of the pandemic.

Open Science is happening. The merits are no longer theoretical or idealistic but tangible. Research is faster than ever, more vetted than ever (think PubPeer), more cited than ever. Fairly, not just because of Open Science, but open access causes readership causes impact causes citations. When new people and organizations start adopting Open Science this warms my hearth.

I am a bit behind with tweeting about new published papers, but let that not reflect that these papers are not very exciting. The first paper is by Marvin an almost-finished PhD candidate in our group and now working as postdoc on the VHP4Safety project. He has been working on linking adverse outcome pathways (AOPs) with molecular pathways, such as in WikiPathways.

Part of the scientific program of the ICCS 2022. Now that most speakers confirmed their talk by registering for the conference, it was time to upload the preliminary scientific program of the International Conference on Chemical Structures (#2022ICCS ).

Last month I reported on the start of the NWO Open Science grant and it is time for an update. First, our grant now has a grant number, 203.001.121. For a project that is about identifiers, having a project identifier is a big deal.

Last year, Denise, Tina, Marvin, and I received an NWO Open Science grant (203.001.121) to improve the long running BridgeDb project, originally developed by Martijn van Iersel (see doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-5). Helena joined our group as research software engineer and will work part-time on this grant.

Serendipity. I did not plan this hack at the BioHackathon Europe 2021 but it happened anyway. Based on earlier work in the Journal of Cheminformatics, extending on the work by Krewinkel et al. I looked into the idea of using the Lua filter for BioHackrXiv, a preprint server for BioHackathons. Actually, I started by looking at the Citation Styling Language file used by the BioHackrXiv tools. But that was just wrong. Long story short: it worked!

Publishing habits changes very slowly, too slowly. The whole industry is incredibly inert, which can lead to severe frustration as it did for me. But sometimes small changes can do so much.