Some 7 years ago, following successes in physics, ChemWeb.com launched the Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS), and Warr evaluated it in a JCIM article three years later. She wrote about ‘lessons learned’, but the only one seemed to have been that chemistry was not ready for it, as the project shutdown in 2004. The archives are still available, fortunately, and you may find it amusing to look up my or some other submission.

Dealing with scientific literature has been one important theme in Chemical blogspace. For example, ranking articles and how to store your personal PDF archive has been topics of discussion. In this blog I will summarize bits of the discussion, and my personal view on things. Searching Searching literature is traditionally done in systems like Chemical Abstracts and Web-of-Science.

I just finished setting up a Blue Obelisk section for Chemical blogspace, as future replacement for the current Planet Blue Obelisk (unless someone wants to take over that webpage). The only thing really missing is a RSS feed for recent posts for just the Blue Obelisk member blogs (BTW, just email me if you want to be listed as BO member with your blog too;

Now that my CUBIC desktop machine is shutting down, I made the necessary backups, among a mail.tar for my mail correspondence of about a year. About 500MB in size for almost 8700 files. Strigi is a perfect tool to help me find messages in this archive, as it will recurse into the .tar archive, and even into email attachements.

Mitch just launched ChemRank, a website where we can comment on and vote thumbs up or down for scientific articles. Good initiative I think.

Some time ago I wrote a small Perl script to convert a decision tree created with Weka in the ARFF format to Java source code, for use in the ionization potential prediction in CDK. The advantage is that Weka is no longer used are runtime, and that there is no model that needs to be loaded and interpreted. Instead, it is simple Java code that does the work, much faster.

I use Google Analytics to analyze the visitors of my blogs and of Planet Blue Obelisk too. Now, for the past couple of weeks, the webpage of the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling is showing up as refering site: What is going on here ?!?! This is really no fake, but cannot find an actual link when I visit the journal webpage either… Update : When looking at the logs, it becomes even weirder.

I just read on Planet Blue Obelisk Peter’s disturbing news (via Suber) that Wiley thinks it can copyright a set of numbers (also known as data). That is a sad milestone in scientific publishing. It reminds me of the recent internet hype about a long number recently flooding the internet (and notably del.icio.us) related to watching DVDs you legally bought.

Getting back on microformats (see yesterday), I added my hCard to the bottom of my blog: I will likely populate it a bit more soon (after holiday in Sweden). Now, if you had the Firefox plugin Operator installed, you would have my contact information show up in your FF toolbar, like this: Note the ‘Export Contact’ button in the toolbar.

Peter blogged some days ago about microformats and how they could be used in chemistry. Being late and a bit absent minded, I added a short comment that Chemical blogspace supports microformats for chemistry, and that chemistry is harvested from that, and actually semantically distributed again using CMLRSS.

After handing in a new draft of my PhD manuscript with my co-promotors last friday, and a week before we leave for Sweden, it is time to start finishing up the material for my one hour workshop on chemoinformatics in general and QSAR/QSPR in particular for the Bioclipse Workshop. Pierre blogged about this movie.