Subject: ORGLIST: Cost of Knowledge, Scientific Information?

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 10:41:06 +0200

(((reformatted)))

From: "Paul Thind" <[email-masked]>

Dear Friends,

Henry Rezepa has raised the profile of a topic which has been of
general concern to educators, scientists and our community of chemist
for sometime.

This phenomena of the global economy moving to a more capitalist model
has been going on for sometime in all aspects of economic life and
informatio n (in particular scientific information - high value added
content) is no exception. As a community we can do something about
it. But I disagree wi th some of the suggestions put forward, in
particular that perhaps individua ls should start selling their
manuscripts (presumably to the highest bidder).

Most Scientists in the world are employees of companies or public
institutions. One can argue that they are already being compensated
for their output. This approach will not solve any problems facing the
majority of students and scientists from around the world and may
create new problems.

What needs to happen is quite the reverse. The Scientific community
needs to organize itself through not-for-profit organizations in order
to publish research results at cost or for free.

However our experience shows that at least our own community of
organic chemists is very poorly organized and not yet sufficiently
motivated to t ake advantage of some existing initiatives which can
benefit everyone.

Almost a year ago we established the not-for-profit ARKAT
Foundation. Its sole aim is to publish a free online journal of
organic chemistry which i s available to the global community. The
project is being funded by an init ial donation of a substantial sum
of money from Alan Katritzky & Linde Katritzky. The funding level is
sufficient for us to make this service available for at least 3-5
years during which time we are confident in generating other revenue
streams to make it secure for ever. The details are on www.arkat.org .

One might have assumed that authors would be knocking on our doors
wishin g to publish and share their results, with the widest possible
distribution , and at no cost to themselves or the user. This has not
been the case.

We are publishing. Two Issues of the Journal are now online. Third is
on the way. But we could be publishing ten to twenty times as many
manuscripts as we are presently receiving. Not even all Professors on
our Board of Refer ees have submitted a manuscript!

We can help authors in publishing their books. We can help the
chemistry community to have its own cost effective databases.

We could be publishing other educational material free or at no or
very low cost in accordance with the author's wishes.

I can only challege all of you. We have a solution to these
problem. Anyo ne who is concerned about the high cost of journals,
books, databases is encouraged to join us in this project. I would
like to hear about reasons for not publishing in Arkivoc!

Please forgive me if I seem to be pouring cold water on a very
important debate!

Best wishes,

Paul Thind
CEO ARKAT Foundation
Schanzeneggstrasse 1
8002 Zurich

Tel: 411 201 9700

----- Original Message -----
From: Eva Horn Moeller <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list orglist <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 9:47 AM
Subject: ORGLIST: Information - Revolution?

Dear all,
this is indeed a very important and critical issue, and I am wholly
surprised that I haven´t thought of this or have heard a discussion of
this kind yet.

It is in fact absurd that the scientific habit of sharing information
globally is taken advantage of by the publishers. Many libraries cannot
lift the economic burden of keeping e.g. CAS, and many departments, as
some of you mention, end up choosing between very slow and difficult -
or very expensive access to chemical info. Now, the publishers can set
the price at any level they choose, and the libraries just have to pay.
Maybe we have been too naive. Especially because we, the researchers, in
theory have the power to shut off the commercial scientific publishing
at very short notice.

I really feel that something should be done about this, and the
discussion ought to be taken to a higher level. What are the opinions of
e.g. the Royal Chemical Society and the American Chemical Society on
this issue?

Best regards,
Eva Horn Moeller
(MSc, PhD)
The Royal Danish School of Pharmacy

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---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 09:32:26 +0100

(((reformatted)))

From: "Rzepa, Henry" <[email-masked]>

>To counteract electronical publishing standard erosion as pushed by
>the marketplace, a globally accepted open/noncommercial expandable
>document publishing standard has to be defined (inasmuch chemical XML
>doesn't qualify already), which has to have means of intelligent full
>text, structure (unique SMILES or graphs) and (IR, MS, NMR) spectre
>searching. These standards have to be implemented in OpenSource
>software, putting the development into the hands of the users.  All
>this is not exactly rocket science so far.
>
>This is all very doable, and in fact being partly done already, but is
>being habitually ignored by the chemical community. Apart from
>occasional laments, the comminity seems to like things just fine as
>they are. Watching this happening for years is incredibly frustrating.

I totally agree that the retention of semantic meanings in the data is
something of a holy grail amongst some of us.  Our own contribution
for example is at

http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chimeral/ which shows how XML and CML can be
used to create an electronic article where IR, MS, NMR, structures,
etc are all "re-usable" information components, presented (using XSLT
stylesheets) in the "way the user wants" and in the context of
appropriate tools. By the way, all this and much more will be
discussed at the Chemint2000 conference (http://www.chemint.org/ ) if
anyone wants to participate)

There have been brave experiments with electronic journals that offer
this to users; J Mol Mod was one of the first, the Internet J of
Chemistry offers perhaps the most developed integration, and projects
such as PhysChemComm from the Royal Society of Chemistry and the
Arkivoc organic chemistry journal (http://arkat.org/arkat/ ) show one
way forward.  But not enough authors (yet) submit articles to such
journals!  When this is analysed, one common reason is that such "new"
journals do not (yet) have an "impact" factor, a chicken and egg
situation if ever I saw one. Ah, impact factors. What HAVE they done
to our subject!!

But if all chemistry journals were of this type (and in particular
expressed in XML, so I feel) then the cost of creation of a CAS, or a
Beilstein, or an ISI or a Cambridge Crystal structure database would
(should!)  drop dramatically.

The only people preventing this from happening, is US, ie the authors
and readers of the chemical heritage!

(Hope this did not sound too pompous!  Is there an Internet equivalent
of a soap box?)
-- 

Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0)20 7594 5804 (Fax)
Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7  2AY, UK. 
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/
__________________