Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, December 13, 2008

Presentation on chemistry resources, quality, and OA

Antony Williams, Qualifying Online Information Resources for Chemists, presented at Making the Web Work for Science: The Impact of e-Science and the Cyber-Infrastructure (Washington, DC, December 8, 2008). See also Williams' blog post:

... I provided an overview of how access to information has changed over the past 20 years for me. I talked about the challenges for publishers serving the chemistry community and how their business models are being challenged and how I empathize with the struggle to figure out how to deal with it. I talked about quality and how care must be taken when using information online. We are all challenged with errors - whether you consider PubChem, ChemSpider, Wikipedia or any of the other online databases they all have errors - how do you find them? ...

I publicly blessed the efforts of publishers such as the [Royal Society of Chemistry] and Nature Publishing group for the efforts they are making to support InChI and improve the quality of document presentation online. I blessed [Chemical Abstracts Service] as a treasure trove of information and the gold standard of curated chemistry. We need them all to be successful for the sake of our science. The challenge is how to fit into the ongoing proliferation of free access to information without modifying the business models. ...