Please see the revised post, A Third Failed Test of ACS Articles on Request and How to Help . Although the introduction, conclusions and comments section of the post below may be useful, the links and discussion around them should be disregarded. A recent post described the lack of public author-oriented documentation for the ACS Articles on Request (AoR) program.

Chemical structure editors play a vital role in chemistry today as a bridge between chemists and their software. In particular, written communication taking the form of reports, patents, and publications very often requires both a structure editor (e.g., ChemDraw) and a word processor (e.g., Word). During preparation of a document, it’s essential that the graphical chemistry content be just as editable as the text itself.

Whether you know it or not, one of your biggest problems as a chemist is keeping current with the chemical literature. Missing one key paper can make the difference between breakthrough and heartbreak. The explosive growth rate of the chemical literature makes it increasingly difficult to keep up. From 1997 to 2007, the number of new documents indexed by Chemical Abstracts Service every year doubled to 1.72 million.

According to a recent editorial by Rick Danheiser, 3-5% of the procedures submitted for review by Organic Syntheses are rejected “due to the inability of the checkers to satisfactorily reproduce the results of their submitters.” During the period 1982-2005 the rejection rate was about 12%. Organic Syntheses was founded to address organic chemistry’s oldest and most persistent problem - documenting and reproducing synthetic procedures.

Electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) have a reputation for being complex, hard to learn, and expensive. The increasing popularity of general-purpose note-taking applications such as Evernote has prompted some to ask whether this kind of software could be used as a simpler, less expensive ELN. The idea sounds appealing - but is Evernote really a viable ELN option today?

The previous posts in this series introduced copyright as it applies to chemistry research and underscored one of the many issues that can arise when authors of research communications grant publishers exclusive copyright.

The recent article Copyright for Chemists led to this comment from dzrlib: The ACS Publications Articles on Request program entitles corresponding authors some possibly useful options for distributing their papers post-publication: “… a link that provides for up to 50 free e-prints of the final published article during the first 12 months following online publication.” Unlimited access to reprints via the link 12 months after publication.

The previous article in this series addressed the question of who owns your papers after publication in chemistry journals like those operated by the American Chemical Society. The answer is very clear: in most cases the publisher owns your paper and you are restricted in what you can do with this important public record of your research. But here’s another simple question: who owns the supporting information for your paper?

Here’s a simple question: who “owns” your papers after they’re published in a journal? The answer depends on the journal. But if you’re like most chemists, the publisher owns your article. Period. You are legally allowed to redistribute your article only under terms given by the publisher. Any other use is punishable by law. Why should this matter?

BlogSyn is a recently-launched post-publication review site for synthetic organic procedures. It has been discussed widely on blogs and Twitter, and was recently featured on Nature News. From the moment the homepage loads, you’ll realize this is no Organic Syntheses. However, the most significant difference lies not in what’s being revealed, but what remains hidden.

Developing a network of contacts is often cited as career advice to chemists. Sometimes, LinkedIn is suggested as a good service for doing so. A recent post describing why one user quit LinkedIn altogether got me thinking about how useful this service is in practice. An older D-F post talked about some problems with LinkedIn forums - specifically, the limitations of investing time and effort on closed discussion forums with a limited audience.