OPEN CHEMISTRY WEB

PHP is great. This quote which appears, ironically, on ASP.net explains why in a nutshell:

“I think PHP is great if you don’t wanna spent alot of time and ENERGY to become a web developer and still have some power”

Now, the literature indexing is built partly with PHP for this very reason. I am not a programmer but I want to program and I want to do it quickly because it’s just a means to an end i.e. building an index. Whether that’s an index of data from articles, CIFs, catalogs etc. is immaterial with PHP. So, it seems to me that for librarians or information professionals wherever, this is a great tool and you dont have to have any extra money (PHP is free as is the Apache webserver). Just determination and constant access to this resource: php.net .

Of course, ChemSpider is .NET and so this can create some difficulties whenever something indexed by me has to be implemented at ChemSpider.com and I rarely have any idea what they are talking about when I hear words like SQL Server and so on. On the whole though, I am increasingly using a combination of free and came-with-my-computer-Microsoft tools. e.g. the indexing runs on a WAMP server.

Snippets of the indexing code include just basic commands e.g. this for matching all URLs on a page including “/catalog/”.

<?PHP

preg_match_all(”@/catalog/[^\"]+@”, $get, $outurls);

?>

So, what does this mean for chemistry libraries. Well, having someone at your  library with this knowhow is a must. Indexing and organising literature and more effectively complementing it with data indexed from the WWW can help a library to make up for the fact that it cannot afford all the subscriptions it would like. And, in an era where these once complex, labour intensive and expensive activities are now free and dynamic, even the smallest library can use this to its advantage. You’re not getting any more money in your budget and your subscriptions aren’t getting any cheaper? … well the solution is still free.

So far in terms of indexing, these are complete:

Hindawi, Electrochemical Science Group, Repositorium (Universidade do Minho Eprints), Medknow, MDPI

The next few to go:

ACBI, IUCr, PubMed Central*, PubMed**, Bentham***, Nature****

* Full text indexing for Open Access list only; ** Bibliographic data and chemical names only; *** Bibliographic data only except Bentham Open (Full Text Indexing); **** OTMI

 All sources are full text indexed unless otherwise stated.

The open access debate has recently focused on the following aspects specifically:

- redistribution of materials

- the scholarly definition of the term “open access” (assuming one is attributable)

- who has the copyright (publisher or author)

- use of terms such as ‘open’ in marketing of services

Now I’m sat here (without access by the way) and I am thinking that these are the concerns of people who ALREADY have access to the articles that they need. Do I ask myself whether I can redistribute an article or if the use the term “open” is justified when I have a page with an abstract and a “buy now” button beneath it. I do not. This is because I cannot get to the thing in the first place. So, all I care about is free full text literature —> the real open access serving the needs of those who cannot get to the literature rather than the people with the Athens password who worry about redistribution and pedantic definitions of terms that were only ever meant to describe a general concept.

So, far from blow torching publishers for providing free full text access services - a bizarre phenomenon in the chemistry blogosphere but a common one - because a copyright policy is not quite to my liking (<violins>) we should applaud the ACS and Nature Sample Issues, the RSC Free Access and the Springer Open Choice (and many more to mention besides) alongside the more generous BioMedCentral’s and Hindawi’s for giving us a chance to get a look at their materials.