ChemSpider Blog

The ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry is an experiment. We intend to demonstrate how modern web technologies can be used to dramatically enhance the type of information that can be communicated using web-based tools over standard online publishing approaches. There are some publishers who are working in delivering additional value to their readers by providing enhanced HTML articles and adding information to their articles such as InChIs to allow structure-based queries online. These publishers include the Royal Society of Chemistry with their Project Prospect and the Nature Publishing Group with their Nature Chemical Biology papers. The majority of articles presented by the commercial publishers are not of a “just-in-time” nature and are delayed by the “processes of publishing”. They are generally fairly lengthy documents and report successful results. They are commonly peer-reviewed and have endured a significant timeline from initial writing to submission, publishers processing, review and publication. Science is however being reported in near real-time under Open Notebook Science (ONS) initiatives. We believe that an online journal can co-exist between the immediate nature of blogging and wiki tools hosting ONS efforts and the more standard processes of the scientific publishers. Some publishers are already allowing online and open peer-review whereby readers provide their feedback to the author in a public forum. Papers can enter a period of online peer review and commentary during which readers provide feedback to the author(s). As a result of this process the authors can engage in public discourse with the commentators and issue a final form of the manuscript. We will offer similar facilities.

We invite manuscripts from anybody interested in exposing their work in the field of chemistry and intersecting fields. In general we expect these communications to be 1500-3000 words in length but there is no limit. We encourage submissions relating to chemistry, biochemistry and chemical biology; regarding synthesis, the analytical sciences and computational chemistry; as research, as commentaries and as questions to the community. Provided the submission relates to the domain of the chemical sciences we will find a place for it within the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry. We encourage submissions from academia and industry, from students and senior scientists, from individuals and teams, for successful research or failed experiments. We encourage submitters to challenge us to host your manuscripts in a manner which most clearly communicates your science. This may include hosting various forms of data made available to the public as Open Data, providing visualization tools for the display of molecules, spectra, images and videos. We intend to not be constrained and to make full use of web-based tools available today and coming online tomorrow.

All articles will be Open Access articles. We will abide by the Budapest Open Access Initiative which declares “By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” Authors must agree to allow unrestricted reading, downloading, distribution, printing, searching and linking to the published work.

Over the past 2 years we believe we have demonstrated our passion for public science, our willingness to serve the community, and integrity in our actions. We hope that the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry will provide a vehicle to all scientists operating within the domain of the chemical sciences to expose their work and interests to the community. We intend to deliver a facile process of submission and superior tools for delivery. We welcome your support and look forward to expanding the communication of chemistry.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 2:18 am and is filed under Chemspider Journal, Community Building, Open Access Publishing, Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.