Announcing the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry
Posted by: Antony Williams in Chemspider Journal, Community Building, Open Access Publishing, VisionCopyright©2008 Antony Williams
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.

December 12th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Tony, maybe I missed it, but what’s the URL for the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry?
December 12th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Rich…there is no URL set yet. We are presently gathering articles to unveil and will declare the URL when we are ready to release.
December 12th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
[...] via WikipediaEarlier today, I read this interesting blog post from Antony Williams announcing The ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry. In his words The ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry is an experiment. We intend to demonstrate how [...]
December 13th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Antony, that’s one way to do it.
Although people might be more inclined to submit articles if they saw that the infrastructure was actually in place and ready to go. Image and perceptions are very important. Even if the site only hosted a vision statement for the time being, that could help.
But the deeper question is “What would this journal provide that self-publication through blogs, wikis, and other means, can not?” What can you (the Journal) do for authors that they can’t now do for themselves?
Look at services like GitHub, in which publication happens automatically as the by-product of writing software and managing it with the service:
https://github.com/
Now imagine this kind service applied to the management of a team’s scientific data. That’s what the future of scientific communication looks like, IMO. Not easy to accomplish, but when it happens it’ll make what we’re doing now look positively quaint.
Just my $0.02.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:50 am
HI Rich, what is the impact for this journal
December 16th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
We already have articles coming in, mostly by word of mouth. Once we’re past the first issue and have demonstrated what is possible then I would hope that the demonstration will encourage submissions.
Not everyone has a blog, a wiki or wants one. Not yet anyway. It is a small community but time should see the change. We’re not at a time where wikis and blogs are indexed, where there value to a CV might be while you and I believe they should be. Maybe GitHub is a good model. Maybe there are others. For now we’re starting here. We are starting here since it’s a low activation barrier to do so. There is little additional bandwidth left outside of everything else we are up to so we’re doing what we can to contribute with the time we have available. Wish us luck
December 17th, 2008 at 3:16 am
[...] Announcing the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry [...]
December 18th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Hi. Do you know if this journal is going to be indexed in any major databases?
December 18th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Ashley, It’s hard to know whether the publication will be indexed in any of the major databases. We are hopeful that the content of the journal will be of sufficient interest to the indexing organizations and will make them aware of our efforts. Historically Open Access journals took a long time to get indexed but the world has changed and they get picked up rather quickly. We are hoping for that. Certainly one of the “indexing organizations” the world cares about today will pick it up overnight. Look at the first hits here: http://www.google.com/search?q=chemspider+journal+of+chemistry&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
December 19th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
[...] 19, 2008 by Rajarshi Guha News of the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry has been posted in various places. This effort is [...]
January 9th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
[...] to Antony Williams, who has (with his ChemArachnid), created a new journal of chemistry, the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry. Their aims are to show the big publishing houses what an electronic journal can be, rather than [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 1:32 am
Do you have an ISSN … as it is helpful for SFX linking
January 30th, 2009 at 1:43 am
I have applied for an ISSN and am awaiting feedback at present.
February 14th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Tony: will there be a volume, issue, page or an article numbering system for the ChemSpider J. Chem. ? I noticed an internal numbering system but what will CA or WoS use to identify the articles?