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

As chemical informatics continues its climb out of a decades-long stagnation, the number of free chemical databases continues to grow. But despite all the activity, reaction databases are notably under-represented.

Although I still don’t use it yet, Connotea is a very useful service for many scientists. Combining aspects of social networking and bibliography management, Connotea offers a glimpse at some of the vast potential for Web 2.0 in the sciences. But the service is not without its thorny technical problems, one of which is discussed in this article. For those unfamiliar with the service, Connotea lets you organize and share hyperlinks.

A previous article introduced PubChem’s Power User Gateway (PUG), an XML-based communication channel. Although NIH kindly supplies a commented schema for PUG queries and responses, there’s nothing like seeing real examples when learning a new language. This article will describe one method for conveniently generating PUG XML queries.

If you’ve been waiting for a simple way to programatically query PubChem without screen scraping, the wait is over. An (apparently) new service called the Power User Gateway (PUG) now offers a direct, XML-based PubChem data channel. See PUG Previous articles have discussed various methods for hacking PubChem: screen scraping (link, link); with the Entrez Utilities; and by simply replicating the database.

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.

Names are powerful. For example, if you work in a field that has a well-recognized title, it’s easy to talk to non-experts about what you do. Doctors, lawyers, NASCAR drivers, actors, and airline pilots all fall into this category. If, on the other hand, you’re a medicinal chemist - well, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Names are especially important in software design.

Building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) is no easy task. The technologies are all there, but twelve years after the release of Netscape Navigator, Web developers are still hacking around browser idiosyncrasies. From JavaScript to HTML, to CSS, browser quirks are still a fact of life.