Where the first workshop day had several talks about new and old features of the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK), the second day was a hackathon day. We hacked and we talked.

As part of our Dutch Research Council (NWO) Open Science grant, we organized a Chemistry Development Kit User Group Meeting (#CDK25UGM), of which yesterday was the “conference” day, and today a hackathon.

Names of chemicals are part of the human user experience when browsing a chemical database. And literature too, of course. Chemical names are also not easy to use, and what a chemical name means is not always clear. This is why the IUPAC started a standardizing nomenclature in chemistry, the IUPAC names. Each IUPAC name uniquely defines the chemical structure it defines. For example, methane is the IUPAC name for the chemical CH4.

A good number of years ago, a colleague and I explored if we could get access to the Retraction Watch Database, but we could not afford it. We have been using data on retractions for curate our databases, like WikiPathways. A database should not contain knowledge based on (only) a retracted article. Wikidata, btw, has a small number (499) of statements supported by retracted articles.

Two weeks ago, the Beilstein Institute announced Bioschemas support in their journals:

This is mostly a test, but if it turns out the way I hope it will, likely after a few iterations, it adds support in my blog for CiTO intent annotations to the DOIs I cite. I pondered about the earlier.

With a year of preparation and two years of thinking, on September 1st 2024 the Department of Bioinformatics, aka BiGCaT, merged with two other departments to form the Department of Translational Genomics (see also this LinkedIn announcement). This merger creates many new opportunities while it strenghtens our bioinformatics research.

I wish I could say I remember the first citation to one of my research articles. I do not. But I do remember the excitement to see why someone was citing my research. What I do remember is that I got a comment around the same time along the lines of this: “why would anyone cite your article if they can download the results for free?” (about open science cheminformatics research). Other times.

One-and-a-half years ago I started migration my blog from blogger.com to a Markdown and Git-based blog. It has been a fascinating journey that I do not regret. I love being back in control and not reliant on features of some content management system. I learned so much along the way, including Jekyll and Liquid to start with, but also Fontawesome (for better or worse)m and Goatcounter for GDPR-compatible and privacy-first impact tracking.

The last week before the winter break Serious Request took place. We started an action around WikiPathways and we collected 877 euro for the MetaKids Foundation. In total there were 2612 actions, many of which brought in a lot more. We ended up in position 928.

In 2022 I had my first experience with the ISAAC database by the Dutch NWO research funding organization. ISAAC is where you apply for funding and where grants get tracked. As such, research output is recorded in this database.