As I often do when at conferences, I reflect on how lucky I am to have attended that particular one and think about what those in other professions might benefit from attending it.

For instance, I belong to that that strange species, the librarian without a library. That is, I work for a center for health research and quality as a research information technologist and think of myself as a librarian but spend a great deal of time in the land of Web development and working on the free services for those in the health sciences, ResearchRaven and and ScanGrants. 

Because I work on tools for researchers and students in the health sciences, I have to hustle (which entails sitting and writing about myself to an excessive extent in the wee hours) to keep up on what is going across a range of fields such as basic science, clinical research, disease advocacy, the use of the Web in healthcare, Web science and science on the Web/online science (the first being the  study of how people use the Web and the second being how science is being done on the Web) , public health, disability research, information science, community health and public policy.   And that is just a partial list.

And I can’t think of organization that possesses such a wealth of talent, provides such a range of services and gets so much done vis-à-vis health policy and disease advocacy level at the national health levels and in terms of moral support for its diverse membership as the Genetic Alliance.

Its membership encompasses sizable disease advocacy groups with large staffs and fairly robust budgets to tiny ones run on a shoestring by the devoted family members of those with a disease so rare that only a few hundred cases are known to exist at any one time internationally to those in the fields of academia, biotech and the life sciences, government, health and science policy, citizen activists/thought leaders, policy analysts, scientists and clinicians and again, the family members of those with rare disorders who have been plunged into the world of nonprofit management and health policy activism and now have to speak the language of genetics and genomics simply out of love for a child with, say, a chromosomal or metabolic disorder.

I have been struck here by how slowly and clearly the many parents who lead such foundations pronounce the name of the condition their child has and how articulately they can explain it (e.g., “NBIA stands for Neurodegeneration with Brain Iron Accumulation (NBIA) disorders….”) which probably comes from long hours of lobbying at every level of government, addressing community groups, chatting with potential donors, working on educational materials and Web sites devoted to the illness and so on.

And these parents (and raising any child requires devotion, not to mention raising one with a chronic disease and/or disability) have had to master not only the terminology of that particular illness but the rapidly changing scientific landscape as the field of genomics has advanced. They also have to school themselves in the minutiae of running nonprofits, which covers everything from fundraising to grants management to tax law and privacy regulation. Oh, and throw in mastering the intricacies of the art of effective social media use, Web site operation, public relations, volunteer management, burnout prevention.

As someone who spends huge amounts of time visiting the sites of the members of the Genetic Alliance looking for grants, fellowships, science prizes, calls for papers for scientific conferences and announcements of such conferences to list on ScanGrants and ResearchRaven, it has been fascinating for me to actually meet the people who run these groups and to sit among them as we all listened to the amazingly diverse groups of experts from such federal agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Public Health Genomics, and such entities as the National Human Genome Research Institute.

One of the sessions featured a talk by Jean Jenkins, a nurse researcher, about G2C2, the Genetics/Genomics Competency Center for Education.

Jenkins made the point that genomic applications in healthcare are increasingly relevant to the day-to-day delivery of care to patients by all health care professionals and has helped create a centralized web resource on that topic for nursing and physician assistant educators. I thought of the many nursing students who passed through the medical library I used to work in and what a new world they will all face as genomics know-how becomes de rigueur in all healthcare settings. The Genetic Alliance excels at public and provider education on such fairly arcane but soon to become common enough concerns in our healthcare experiences, as professionals and as patients.

As I said above when I attend a conference, I think who might have benefitted from also attending it. Here is the agenda—look for yourself.

Offhand, I would think that nurse educators, nurse researchers, health educators, public health workers, health economists, physicians, lawyers in the field of health law, professors of public policy (they could learn a thing or two from the advocacy prowess of the Genetic Alliance) and technologists would all benefit from face time with so many federal and state government people who serve on the advisory boards and committees and bureaus that make policy.

My particular passions and hobby horses, for instance, are Open Science, Open Data, Open Access and Science 2.0. What struck me the most by attending the Genetic Alliance conference are the common interests that the Open Science and Genetic Alliance communities have (e.g., advancing medical and scientific research). What does the Genetic Alliance bring to the table in that regard? Well, sheer brainpower and ability when it comes to public policy in the fields of science and medical research with an impressive track record, such as an instrumental role in the passing of Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) of 2008.

And much of the Open Science agenda will require allies in policymaking circles, given that so much of it is predicated on the exchange of information, funding for higher education and cyberinfrastructure and scientific research. And I can’t think of a better ally when it comes to perseverance and expertise on matters scientific and legal/legislative in the medical research realm than the Genetic Alliance.

And, as I have found of leaders of the Open Science movement (like Jean-Claude Bradley and Bora Zivkovic), the leaders and members of the Genetic Alliance are just plain nice people. I talked to many people who, like me, had never attended the conference before and we were all struck by how pleasant the staff is. Likable, bright, enthusiastic, committed to the cause of helping all of their members from simple moral support in a dismal era for nonprofits to the creation of innovative, practical tools and an increasing array of Web-based repositories both of educational materials and biological materials.

Just as example of how niceness is a big factor in the success of the Genetic Alliance, one of the traditions of the conference is the appearance of Francis Collins, now head of the NIH and one of the giants of the fine art of science administration and a major figure in the field of genetics. I have read about him over the years and of what a decent, lovable caring person he is and he is certainly beloved by the genetics community, personified by the people I met at this conference.

Collins was very approachable—he simply appeared with his guitar and sang songs of the Bob Dylan/Pete Seeger variety and invited one and all to join in. And several of the songs were takeoffs on academia and genetics (not, one would think, promising material or hilarity) and very funny. Much laughter and merriment.

I am a rather conservative person and don’t usually go for “Kumbaya Moments,” but I got quite tearful at one point (actually, tears were streaming down my face) as Collins sang about good people and I knew the room was filled with researchers and family members of the ill or dead from genetic diseases and with students embarking on careers in medicine and genetic counseling and I thought of all those years of study and board meetings and letter writing they had cumulatively put in.

I thought most of my beloved boss in the medical library and her recent death from ALS and I finally worked up the courage to tell Dr. Collins how much Dorothy had meant to me, how she had taught me to use one of the NIH’s finest tools, PubMed and how grateful I am to him for his work in advancing scientific research on ALS and other diseases in his time in government. I got tearful and must have seemed a bit peculiar. But he made me feel quite at ease and just said softly something along the lines of, “We will do whatever we can to fight those diseases.” It shows the high regard the president and CEO of the Genetic Alliance Sharon Terry is held in that a man of the stature of Francis Collins and a man that busy came to hang out with her and people lucky enough to have attended this conference.

I have to pack up now to head home later today. I am happy to report that the session Science 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0, and Open Science: The Revolution is Now I helped lead went well. I talked too long and interrupted the attendees. (Ooops!)  But I was impressed by the ideas generated for possible Open Science projects and was grateful for the interest shown in that important topic. Everyone in the room was supportive and patient. Never has one person been rescued by so many people so often. (I have an unfortunate habit of misplacing glasses, hearing aids, etc.)

I learned a lot here and leave with ever greater respect for disease advocacy groups.

The article is E Is for Everything: The Extra-Ordinary, Evolutionary [E]Journal by Gerry McKiernan The Serials Librarian, 1541-1095, Volume 41, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 293 – 321.

McKiernan has very generously, helpfully self-archived the piece here.

There are several reasons I want to write about McKiernan’s piece.

First of all, the article is an excellent overview of what publishing an article in a scholarly journal has entailed over the years, how things stood in 2002 and how things were progressing back then.  I wish I had been assigned this article in library school and recommend it to library science instructors.

I was particularly struck by the wording, “…the journal is one large object made up of article objects, individual request objects, a server object, solution objects, page objects, and reference objects, and other objects that interact with each other, the network and the hardware environment to create the journal that is delivered to each reader…In this model, the reader is considered an object that dynamically participates in the creation of the journal.”

Pretty prescient of McKiernan and the authors he cites, End-User Customized Chemistry Journal Articles Steven M. Bachrach,* Anatoli Krassavine, and Darin C. Burleigh J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci., 1999, 39 (1), pp 81–8.

I had not heard of Steven Bachrach before and it really is fascinating how much of the work in leveraging the power of the Web for Science 2.0 is being done not by info professionals but by chemists such as Bachrach, Jean-Claude Bradley, and Antony Williams.

Librarians and information scientists are major beneficiaries of the work the chemists and other basic scientists are doing vis-à-vis transforming the very basics of how science is done and what forms scientific communication and scholarly publishing are taking.

Thank you, Gerry McKiernan, for instance, for introducing those of who live in the world of librarianship and the info sciences to the quite brilliant Dr. Bachrach who seems to have no trouble excelling in his field of chemistry while in his off hours helping to transform the very basis of the cornerstones of the edifice of scientific communication: the journal and the article. Kind of depressing, really, what people like Bachrach, Williams and Bradley accomplish in so many fields while the rest of us struggle along trying to do even one or two fairly useful things in our own, less impressive grooves!

The second reason I wanted to highlight McKiernan’s article is that it is an excellent example of the value of self-archiving as a way of sharing one’s scholarly production with greater audiences than may be subscribers of a particular journal. Thanks to McKiernan’s proactive actions of a) self-archiving his article so that it is easily accessible as a PDF to all comers and b) alerting various audiences to his article with a link on where to find it more of us can learn about important topics.

For instance, I noticed a message from McKiernan himself in one of the electronic discussion lists of The American Society for Information Science & Technology ASIS&T: a good lesson on the merits of unabashed marketing of one’s work. I wish more librarians would do the same—don’t be shy, group! More of us should request from scholarly publishers (and this goes for everyone—scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, the sciences, etc.) the right to self-archive or deposit our work in institutional repositories.

And this brings me another reason I want to highlight McKiernan’s act of self-archiving. It is actually to the benefit of the journal and thus to the publisher of it.

For instance, I am not a serials librarian but I am now interested in the journal in which McKiernan’s article first appeared and have been perusing the web site of the journal, The Serials Librarian and almost certainly would not now be considering subscribing had I not been able to download and read McKiernan’s article and to think, “Hmm, I am not a serials librarian. But this is a pretty thought-provoking article. I wonder what else is in that journal…”

And I came across some quite interesting stuff in the abstracts, like this one about the article, “What Color is Your Paratext?” and was edified there to read this quite interesting passage:

Geoffrey Bilder from CrossRef discussed the problem of how to identify trustworthy scholarly information on the Internet. This problem is exacerbated by readers’ growing distrust of intermediaries such as publishers and librarians, by the fact that the Internet lacks the traditions that have developed in scholarly communication to ensure trust, and by the sheer amount of information now readily available. Paratext is understood as anything outside of a text that sets expectations about that text. In the past, paratext, for example a publisher logo, provided important clues as to the trustworthiness of information. In the context of the Internet, Bilder suggested creating a meta-brand to serve as paratext. CrossRef is developing a meta-brand called CrossMark that would certify for the reader that the online content to which it is attached has been vetted by processes of scholarly review and is therefore trustworthy.

That snippet made me think, “How sloppy of me to have gotten all the way through library school just a year ago and not really to have grasped what CrossRef is.”

Therefore, I checked out what it is exactly.

This is a rather long-winded (but you are all used to that with me, no?) way of saying that allowing for self-archiving is good for readers, authors who want to be read and the journals that allow for it. It also shows that journals can be quite effectively promoted by the generosity of the editors who allow people like McKiernan to self-archive. Good for Taylor & Francis, Routledge and Informa (so many imprints these days!) for allowing me to get a look via McKiernan’s article for free of what kinds of things appear in The Serials Librarian and thereby better gauge the value of a paid subscription to it. Clever of them! And, by the way, kudos to Iowa State University Library for sharing the esteemed McKiernan with the wider world of library and information science.

I work in the healthcare industry and one of my tasks is keeping up on developments in how clinical research is funded and conducted and its results disseminated. I have worked in a medical library, for instance, and medical librarians know about the Open Access movement. But they may not know about all of the vitality and software tool generation that is happening in the world of Open Science, activity which leads to the publication of what becomes the final product as far as medical librarians and their patrons (physicians, nurses, pharmacists) are concerned—a paragraph or two in a piece of medical literature.

I envision as the readers of this interview a wide range of people including medical librarians, medical students, undergraduates and graduate students in the sciences and engineering, technologists, healthcare industry analysts and anyone interested in what appears to be a revolution in scientific communication, a revolution that we can all welcome given that it promises to streamline many aspects of the scientific process and to facilitate communication between scientists to the ultimate benefit of everyone who will ever become ill or love someone who is. As you can see, you are a very important person in my book!

Here is how I came to hear of you. I began to write about search engines and then about Science 2.0 matters in 2008. I came to visit the Life Scientists room of FriendFeed.

Being new to the subject, I noted that I kept seeing certain names bandied about as the go-to experts on the subject of Open Science and noticed that certain people were cogent thinkers and superb writers and people who appeared to be made of nothing but stamina and brilliance, so ubiquitous was their presence and so obvious their influence among the scientists in that community. I kept seeing certain names (e.g., Jean-Claude Bradley, Michael Nielsen, Bora Zivkovic, Bill Hooker). And I kept seeing references to a certain Cameron, who seemed to be universally regarded as the man who would assess astutely to the benefit of all some significant development in the world of online science. I wondered who this Cameron was. I know much more now, having discovered your blog, Science in the Open,
your postings in FriendFeed and having viewed many of your slideshows.

Could you please tell us a bit of your background? What kind of scientist are you, for instance?

I started off in what was at the time fairly conventional metabolic biochemistry doing an undergraduate project looking at what food molecules platelets selected from plasma when given the choice. Then I moved more towards biophysics and biotechnology during my PhD, looking at ways to manipulate DNA to make what were then large libraries of variants of the gene specific protein, trying to figure out how to make protein copies of all of those genes and then select the one or two out the billions that did what we want. The theme since then has really been about developing new ways of applying physical techniques from physics and chemistry to looking at protein structure and function.

My current job at the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK is an interesting mix of developing new techniques, using these to tackle specific structural problems, and working with the scientists who come in to use our facilities to help them solve problems. I enjoy working with other people and this job gives me a good opportunity to do that and for that to be valued, something that is often missing in university settings.

Let’s talk terminology for a moment. I noticed that Open Science people tend not to use the term, Science 2.0. Do you think Science 2.0 is a valid term with staying power or do you prefer the terms Open Science and/or online science?

Both “Open Science” (I actually prefer “Open Research” as it is more inclusive) and “Science 2.0” are good rallying points and give a broad impression of an idea, or even a sense of a movement. I guess as a scientist, though, I find them lacking precision and I’m conscious of the ability of imprecision to lead to problems. Science 2.0, like Web 2.0, is a fairly vague term with more risks than most. Do we mean that it is version 2.0 – in which case we would be safer talking about being currently at 1.5? Is it purely about Web 2.0 tools, and is it therefore set up in opposition to Semantic Web, sometimes called Web 3.0 technologies, which I think are crucial to taking the agenda forward?

I guess, overall, I am comfortable with using Open Science/Research to refer to a movement of people who are essentially heading in the same direction. Science (or Research) 2.0 doesn’t for me capture a clear enough image to be helpful. I prefer “web native” or “using what we’ve learnt from the web for science.”

Please tell us about Open Notebook Science. Is it possible that there could arise related movements such as Open Engineering in engineering education? Are there any such programs?

Open Notebook Science is two things: a process and a commitment. The commitment is that you make your best effort to make the full record of your research available as you record it; i.e. as close as possible to as it happens. In a sense this is an ideal rather than something that is practically achievable. There are always variables that you don’t record, indeed don’t think to record, the “unknown unknowns” of research. But the point is that you do the best that is feasible with the resources you have – at a minimum making sure that the record that you use and make is the one that is available to the rest of the world. The process is how you go about making this happen. It involves some use of web-based tools to make your record and put it online, but a lot of it is just about raising the standards of your record keeping.

There is a growing movement across education to provide more of the underlying materials, lecture notes, videos etc. best demonstrated by the MIT Open Courseware initiative. These tend to be about making available materials that already exist. In the Maker and DIY communities there is a lot of interest in sharing designs and experiences of building objects and tools as well as much of the sense of playfulness that also characterizes the record of science and for me this makes a closer analogy.

Is there much interaction between the uber geeks of Open Source and the more basic science lab guys of Open Notebook Science?

Relatively little. It is also important to make a distinction between the Open Source and the Free Software communities that have different aims and philosophical attitudes. In as much as Open Source software makes it easier to be an open researcher through standards and code sharing there is a logical connection. There are also philosophical parallels – that the most effective way of working is to allow others to be involved. Logistical connections as well because the challenges involved in getting Open Source projects to work in practice are similar to the issues you start to face when people, skilled or unskilled, want to contribute (or in some cases wreck) a scientific project.

There are connections and people like Egon Willighagen are strong proponents of both approaches. John Wilbanks has recently written some nice pieces on where the analogy between Open Code and Open Research breaks down. In many ways we have more to learn from the people who look closely at developing best practice in code development. People who work hard on understanding how to document code, how to most effectively get it written and reviewed, and how to educate people to do both the writing, recording, and documentation well. Greg Wilson is a standout contributor in this area.

What led you to decide to take up a leading role as an advocate for Open Science? Was there some epiphanic moment? Or did you just come over a period of years to realize that there had to be a better way to do science given the rise of Web technologies and ever cheaper forms of computing?

Hah. Funny story, which I’ve written about. Basically it was all down to an irritating corporate firewall that lead me in a fit of pique to say we were just going to make our online notebooks completely available. I guess I was primed to think that way by the online reading I’d started to do but really my own ideas only developed after I suddenly thought “actually that’s a bit radical, I wonder if anyone else has thought of this…”. Of course they had and that led me into the writing of and Peter Murray-Rust amongst others that developed my own thinking.

Could you tell us how you go about doing the following, “I largely focus my research work on methodology development and enabling others. I can potentially have a bigger impact by building systems and capabilities that help others do their research than I can by doing that research myself…”

I figure when it comes to the science there are people who can do it better than I can. Where I seem to be able to make the biggest difference is in helping others to do their science. So at STFC we are working towards developing new approaches to look at the structure of “difficult” proteins – that we hope will be useful to others. On a more prosaic level we just build up our own expertise to try and make sure that when users come in we ensure that their experiment works properly and that they can get their data analysed and published (that’s the aim anyway).

Finally, by doing this we show examples of little things that people can do. Maybe they don’t want to put everything online in a public way straight away but giving a working example of an online notebook means that people see it can be done – see the advantages and disadvantages and might choose to do that for themselves. Similarly by talking about using collaborative literature filtering and online services like Citeulike, Mendeley, and Zotero, it gives people a push to using those services which makes them better for everyone. This makes it important that all of these pieces of process, of practice, are useful in their own right and that they don’t have to be combined together to work.

You have been working a lot on Google Wave, for instance. Could you discuss that? How does it play into your statement here, for example, “…we need to build tools that make it easy to take those unstructured or semi-structure records and mold them into a specific structured narrative as part of a reporting process that the researcher has to do anyway. Writing a report, writing a paper. These things need to be done anyway and if we could build tools so that the easiest way to write the report or paper is to bring elements of the original record together and push those onto the web in agreed formats through easy to use filters and aggregators then we will have taken an enormous leap forward.”

Wave is suffering through a very accelerated hype cycle at the moment. What got me excited about it in the first place was really two specific things; the ability to automate the collection and capture of information in an environment which can feel to the user similar to a simple text entry; and the use of history as a way of dealing with the problems of provenance, who did what and when. We haven’t seen much technical development of the latter yet, but there is a lot of promise there for the future. It has been the capture of information that I’ve been mainly working on.

The idea is that you encourage them to put in a little effort, tagging or marking up their record, because they get a big return for it; ease of marking up next time, a complete searchable index of their work for free. This doesn’t have to be built in Wave; you can imagine doing something in Word, Excel, Open Office, Google Docs, Wikis, whatever. The difference for me is that Wave for the first time made it feasible for me to directly start building things that could be useful for other users. And that was what really excited me.

One of the things that struck me as I viewed Jean-Claude Bradley’s fascinating slideshow, “Leveraging Transparency and Crowdsourcing in Chemistry Using Open Notebook Science” is that the process delineated in it seemed to both facilitate the process of scientific discovery and perhaps at times to impede it given the many tools (wikis, Google Spreadsheets, YouTube, Second Life, etc.) that scientists now have to keep track of. Could you discuss some of your favorite tools and what tools are under development that could leverage the particular advantages of each? Is there some mega-platform under development that would address certain problems and what are those problems? Is Google Wave the answer? Is an answer really possible given that some tools are Open Source and some commercial?

It’s a real problem in two ways, first that with lots of different packages you inevitably hit cases where you can’t get information out of one and easily into another. This is why data portability and standards for import and export are so important. It’s a bit dull but in some ways data portability is more important than getting the data out – but we need critical mass of data to get the tools built and around we go in circles. I personally have no problem with a mixture of commercial and Open Source tools, I use what is most helpful to me at the time. But data portability is crucial – What Open Source gives me is some sort of guarantee that I can get my data back out again.

My hope is that Wave or something like it, some sort of aggregated inbox that can talk to all of these systems, or rather many of these that work in different ways to serve different people’s needs, will arrive and help us solve the problem. Sometimes it feels like we are at the stage of rubbing sticks together and hoping something will happen though.

You met a few months ago with Elsevier. Now, to many who are passionate about Open Access and of the school of Information Wants to be Free, Elsevier is the bloated, multinational, science-impeding devil incarnate. And yet here it was talking to you, Mr. Open Science. That was intriguing and a credit to Elsevier. Could you please tell us how and why they approached you and what your interactions were?

I was invited to what they called an “Ideation Workshop.. Essentially they got a group of internal people together from different groups, sales, IT, journals, many of whom had never met to talk about the long term strategy for their web services. I won’t talk about the details of what was discussed because I didn’t ask for permission to do so but in general terms they were engaged, interested, and looking at how to contribute to the long term future of both scholarly communication and its management, and the commercial health of the company.

What I said to them was essentially that they needed to ask themselves who their customers really were and where the opportunities to have viable long terms business models are. I started with the assumption that there will be a move towards more Open Access publication, driven by funders, and that there were simultaneously big commercial opportunities to be found in providing new types of services to research institutions, funders, and government. And that these opportunities depend on them getting Open Access to the literature…

Did you, for example, discuss with them their Article of the Future project and do you agree with John Wilbanks that there is very little that is transformative at all in the project?

Actually we didn’t talk about the “Article of the Future” – I’m not absolutely sure whether it was even out at that point. However, I do share John’s assessment. I think I was a bit more brutal at the time. Essentially all I saw was the article of the past…but on a web page. There were some nice presentational aspects and I liked the way “supplementary” information was promoted to having a place in the paper but my over-riding response was that what they’d done should have been trivial if the information was organized properly in the first place. If it wasn’t trivial there were more important problems to solve than presentational ones.

And speaking of the article of the future, do you think that perhaps the scholarly article in a way has no future or that it will become in only a few years time a perfunctory afterthought for a young scientist instead of the crucial career-making measure of accomplishment that it still is?

I think the role of the journal article in making a claim, or expressing an idea in human-readable form will remain important. But as the literature grows we need more effective ways to manage it, and we have to ask ourselves as a community whether we can afford it. More often than not when I read a paper I am looking for a single number, a link to a data file, or a single statement. My personal view is that we could lose maybe 90% of all published papers and simply put the data up with some methodological description on line. This would save billions, money that could then be spent on research.

The problem with this thinking is that these different costs are rarely tensioned together. No researcher ever has to make the choice of “do I spend $50k on a Nature paper or do I employ the postdoc for another year?” If people were having to make that choice on a regular basis I think pre-print archives would flourish.

After all, in the world that you and Jean-Claude Bradley seems to be actually creating, publication as we now know it is almost irrelevant given that much that is of interest in the sciences is now becoming available in many venues such as preprint sites like Nature Precedings.

For me the question is really about we do this in the most cost-effective manner while making sure the outputs of research are as available as possible. This means we need different types of “publication” for different types of output and different types of peer review at different stages. Again, until we are tensioning all the costs of research against each other I don’t really see this happening, and we will continue to pour taxpayers money down the drain.

Could the rise of Open Science actually benefit the mainstream publishers in that as processes and communications become ever more efficient and scientific networks expand, thereby pooling resources, the publishers may reap the benefit of ever greater amounts of science to publish? Or will they have to contend with the fact that the coming generation of researchers will become so used to such seamless science-making that they will scoff at the idea that they need to publish in a journal that only the richest of research libraries can afford? How do you see Open Science affecting the career paths, say, of young biochemists or neuroscientists? Are there some fields that are simply not suited to the world of Open Science such as many of those in the health sciences?

There are massive commercial opportunities in providing repositories and platforms to enable the publication and archival of research in its widest sense. Someone is going to make a killing on this by having the right platform to deliver what researchers and their funders need, when they realize they need it, and conventional publishers have a lot of expertise in building the tools and frameworks, and managing the infrastructure that can support these kinds of services.

I think there may be communities that are not suited to Open Science. I think we need to ask difficult questions about privacy and the rights of test subjects. But issues of privacy are much bigger than just those around Science; perhaps they are the major social issue we need to face up to in the Western World over the next decade. So there are special cases where data cannot be made open and probably should not be made open, but they are special cases, and not the default.

Could you please compare and contrast the attitudes and successes of Elsevier, Springer and Nature Publishing Group vis-à-vis adapting to the pressure from researchers and even now the general public for greater employment of the principles of Open Access?

At a corporate level I don’t think any of these organizations are adapting or making opportunities for themselves. I think they are responding and trying to manage those changing expectations without undergoing radical change that would be required to respond positively. That said, within all of these organizations there are people who understand the promise and opportunity of OA, but large organizations change slowly. BMC seems to be doing well inside of Springer, but it remains to be shown that this is more than a side experiment for the parent company. NPG are probably the most productively engaged with the whole agenda of improving scholarly communication but even there, they will only accede to non-commercial licences for their so-called OA offering. A case of offering just enough to keep the crowd happy rather than taking the opportunity of stealing a march on the competition.

You say, “The journal used to play an important role in publication. The publisher still has an important role but we need to step outside the notion of the journal and present different types of content and objects in the best way for that set of objects.” Will it become the case that scientists could simply start purchasing what we might call nano-content? To wit, just the conclusion of a full article or a single graph or chart from one? Do you see the publishers going for such a model on the premise that some revenue out of an article is better than none or will they balk at the idea of making peanuts on piecemeal distribution of bits and pieces of what they can, as things stand now, potentially sell for a hefty sum as a whole, intact object?

There is an alternative to the OA model, and that is the micro-payments model in which the researcher has their own budget and pays small amounts for what they need. An iTunes for science if you like. But by analogy with the music industry if this was the way forward then you can imagine peer to peer sharing of purchased content being very popular. And DRM for science is bad news. It’s bad news anyway but the whole point of getting research content is so you can build on it. Making that difficult would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Now I am going to put you on the spot and ask you to help readers gain a grasp of who is who in Open Science and what the particular strengths of and accomplishments of each are.

Let’s start with John Wilbanks. Could you please delineate for us the relationship of Science Commons to Open Science? Wilbanks seems to an interesting bridging figure between the world of Open Science, Open Access, the whole world of the idea of an information commons, big data and Web 2.0. Do you interact with him much and where do your interests and views intersect and diverge?

John is the figure who perhaps more than anyone else has driven forward the discussion and ideas around the high level of issues of policy and practice as well as actively pushing forward with specific projects. The success of Science Commons is getting exemplar projects moving forward, such as the SAGE project, is largely due to John’s boundless energy and enthusiasm. Mostly we intersect when we happen to be at the same meeting. I’m in strong agreement with John about most things. Perhaps we were diverge somewhat is that he is a stronger proponent of “core” semantic web approaches whereas I would characterize myself more as feeling that we will be able to work with a more flexible range of technologies. But it’s a very minor difference.

Michael Nielsen. Is he more of a theorist and explicator and less of a hands-on scientist than you and Jean-Claude Bradley?

Michael definitely comes from a theoretical background which brings another perspective. It isn’t clear to me for instance that the idea of an Open Notebook evens makes sense for a theoretician. I don’t really have a clear enough idea of how they work on a day to day basis. At the same time Michael is far and away the most conventionally successful scientist who is an active proponent of Open Notebook style approaches. The fact that he has largely moved away from active research to focus on trying to change the practice of science sends a very strong message. I sometimes wish I had the courage to follow that example.

Jean-Claude Bradley. How do you two resemble one another? I would say that you blog more extensively in the scientific essay mode a la Michael Nielsen and that Bradley tends to be a bit more utilitarian in his approach. Am I close here?

Jean-Claude is the real originator and driving force behind the Open Notebook movement. I guess we are similar in our approximate career stages and we have some cross over in terms of research interests. Jean-Claude takes a much more direct and immediate approach to his work, using tools and services that are available and taking a very strong approach to requiring that those are freely available. He also seem to have a lot more energy than I do!

I think if you were to characterize the difference between us it would be the Jean-Claude is much more focused on outcomes and immediate returns whereas I am more interested in process. This means that he gets on and uses what is available to make things happen. I tend to be more interested in (and get more frustrated about) building tools for further down the line. We have some slight philosophical differences in that I think I am more gung-ho about favouring policy changes that push researchers harder in the open direction but these are shaded differences of emphasis rather than big differences.

Bora Zivkovic

Bora is the uber-science blogger. He is one of the longest serving science bloggers with the biggest following. He has been a long term ideological supporter of Open Access and open movements. I think he has a much more political and policy orientation than most of the rest of us do.

Rich Apodaca

Rich I know mostly through his writing on Depth-First and the development of various tools, most recently ChemPedia and its associated Stack Overflow-based site ChemPedia Labs. Mostly my interactions with Rich involve one of his tightly written blog posts that crystallize an idea, often around practice or scholarly publication. Two posts that stand out for me was one on the Seven Deadly Sins of scientific publication (practice?) and things he wrote about micropublication.

Bill Hooker

When I first started reading stuff online Bill was one of the very early people I came across (along with Jean-Claude, Deepak, and Neil Saunders). His three part series on 3 Quarks Daily was a very strong early influence on my thinking. He is one of the most active and vociferous advocates of open practice around. I once jokingly characterized him as “Bradley’s Bulldog.. Probably more than anyone else Bill has taken the fight to the online trenches, arguing the case in forums and blogs.

Antony Williams of ChemSpider

Antony again is one of these people with apparently boundless energy who just keeps getting on and doing things. He spent years pushing his personal vision of an online resource for chemists forward with little or no funding spending vast amounts of time on it. Now that Chemspider has been purchased by the Royal Society of Chemistry and he has more resource and stability you might think he would take a rest and sit back a bit but he seems to be pushing forward and in the air travelling even more than he was before.

Antony is a do-er. Again a bit like Jean-Claude he will take what is available and make things happen. He is less interested in the technical and sometimes ideological issues that rage around licences, databases, and information structures and more focused on building an end product that people can use. This can and does lead him into conflict sometimes with people that are more worried about other aspects of the problem, but we need that diversity of approaches and services if we want jam today as well as tomorrow. Bottom line, Tony makes stuff happen.

Deepak Singh

Deepak again was one of the people online that I came across very early and had a strong influence on my thinking, particularly on tools, technical issues, and systems design. Also simply in the way he presents himself online. He has one of the most effective and coherent online personas I’ve come across. His experience and approach is more commercially oriented than mine so pay very close attention when he writes and speaks about issues around intellectual property and commercial practice.

We probably differ in our stance around patent law and intellectual property, not because we fundamentally disagree about any principles, we both want to see the most effective conversion of research into valuable innovation, but because of our background and experiences.

Andrew Lang

Andy I first came across as Hiro Sheridan in Second Life and it took me a while to make the connection. He has been really instrumental in creating a lot of the imagery that has supported a range of projects. He is a dab hand at pulling together rapid and lightweight visualizations of data using a wide range of tools. Again there is a focus on making stuff happen. His background in maths and computing has made it possible to turn a lot of things around very fast. Particularly in combination with Rajarshi Guha who did a lot of the development of chemoinformatics services that support every aspect of the Open Notebook Solubility Project he is one of the team that have turned perhaps rather dry lists of numbers into compelling visualizations.

and the up and comer Steve Koch

Koch has been a real breath of fresh air and has brought new energy into the whole community. As a new tenure track academic he is really putting everything on the line and pushing the envelope on Open Notebook Approaches. I have thought for a while that ONS approaches would be most risky for new academics and that therefore they would be unlikely to take this approach. I am delighted that he is proving me wrong on a daily basis.

I should also mention that he has a young and extremely energetic research group that are really backing him up and are also gung-ho on Open Science. Anthony Salvagno, Andy Maloney, Larry Herskowitz, Brian Josey and the others are all energetic, positive, and getting out there to make more of their science available.

and Shirley Wu who, given her job at 23andMe , is a fascinating example of how the coming cohort of scientists and technologists interested in Open Science are becoming figures of note in related areas such as Health 2.0 and in the commercial sector.

Shirley first got in touch with me via my blog when she was a PhD student in Russ Altmann’s lab at Stanford, with the suggestion of running an Open Science session at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. She did most of the running on this, writing up the report, being far more successful than me at getting sponsorship and generally pulling everything together to make it happen.

She has been both a great thinker and articulator of ideas on her blog and although her writing has been more focused recently on writing on the Spittoon at 23andMe on specific genetic issues I think she has a great future writing more generally about science and how it is carried out. I certainly hope that she continues to write about her ideas and opinions in that area.

Have I missed any major figures?

Other people I should mention as both major players and influences are Peter Murray-Rust, who is one of the most sustained and energetic fighters for Open Access and Open Research around. He has been a bit less active in the blogosphere recently because of the large number of big projects he is involved in. In his group at Cambridge both Jim Downing and Nico Adams have been pushing on the tools front for a long time.

In terms of influence there are far too many people to mention. I often think I have no ideas of my own, I merely synthesize the ideas of others. So all the past and current people on Friendfeed, Twitter, and online more generally make a big difference, sometimes in small pieces and sometimes in larger ones.

Could you comment on the role that search might play in Open Science? For instance, does Wolfram|Alpha hold any particular interest for you or do you think it was much overhyped?

Search is crucial for the success of Open Science. As we put more stuff online it has to be possible to find it. This means developments in semantic search, as well as improved computational engines like Wolfram Alpha. WA is an impressive piece of technology but from my perspective it has a fatal flaw. It only works on the curated information that is in their database. This has two problems – a lot of the chemistry in their is simply wrong or badly misleading. Various of us have reported problems, but I’ve seen little progress on this. But fundamentally if we don’t know what the root data is or its source then it is of little use to the wider research community where provenance is everything.

The second problem is related but slightly different. Because it is a curated database there is absolutely no way it can keep up with what we are generating. Now if WA could work over my data then I would be interested in formatting it in the correct way. But since it can’t there is little point. Until WA can be connected to a data aggregator that spiders the web I think it will be a useful tool for a few things but mainly a toy. If it can use the whole web as a database then things become very very interesting.

Where are we on the purchase of FriendFeed by FaceBook? Many of the members of FriendFeed (including yourself) seemed concerned that much of the accumulated knowledge in the science-focused rooms therein would be lost to the community. What do you see as the future of FriendFeed under FaceBook?

I can’t see that FriendFeed has a long term future in its current form as essentially the ex-project of the FaceBook development team. We are already seeing things take a long time to fix or problems (like the broken search) just not being fixed. I think we’re on the long slide down to oblivion. The question is, how long?

There are a lot of good ideas out there. I’m not worried about whether we could build something if we needed to. What I am worried about is how we could fund that work.

Speaking of FaceBook, do you have any comment on the supposed showdown over the future of the Internet vis-à-vis the more gated community orientation of FaceBook versus the freer orientation of Google? Bets on who will win or is such a duel genuinely in the offing? Implications for Open Science?

Apparently there is a whole generation who think FaceBook is the internet. I think in the end open wins out, the bigger system, with greater diversity and greater ability to create new systems wins. That’s true when there is real diversity and competition. A good question is whether it remains true when one system captures the majority of the market. Internet Explorer is losing market share even though it had enormous penetration. But equally Chrome is struggling somewhat even with the might of Google behind it. And if Google aren’t supporting Mozilla then can Firefox survive?

I want to believe that open always wins in the end. Sometimes I fear that my conclusions are being driven by my wishes rather than the evidence, though.

You use Twitter, but you don’t seem to have written much about it. Do you see it as having much of a role to play in Open Science? Jean-Claude Bradley does not seem to have mentioned it as one of the many tools employed by the scientists engaged in the project he discusses in the slideshow mentioned above, “Leveraging Transparency and Crowdsourcing in Chemistry Using Open Notebook Science.” Whom do you regard as must-follows on Twitter? What Twitter tools do you use?

I use Twitter largely as a way of tracking a somewhat different community of people to that I find on Friendfeed. I don’t get much “real science” out of Twitter. It is more about staying in contact with the IT and UK information management communities. I think in most cases the tool is close to irrelevant; it’s the community that matters. To the extent that the tool matters it is because of the way it supports the formation and management of the communities relevant to you, not the functionality itself.

In terms of information gathering the person I get the most from on Twitter is Glyn Moody, but to be honest I could cope if it closed tomorrow. I use Twhirl to follow on my laptop and Seesmic on my phone.

On a related note, what do you see as the future of RSS?

RSS, or rather feeds in general are key to the future of information management in my view. ATOM is more powerful and flexible but doesn’t need to worry the user too much, ATOMPub is a great protocol for pushing information as well. Feeds can go in both directions. Going forward we will also see more real time “feeds” using push protocols like XMPP. But at the bottom my entire world view is about manipulating feeds of information and objects: controlling which ones come to me and deciding how to deal with them and pushing out other feeds of content I’ve touched, used, or created.

Where are we with the matter of Open Science logos and how crucial do you think that matter is?

Clarity is really important when you are saying what you intend to do and how to do it and in that sense I think logos are really useful. They also, by the use of trademarks, let you define standards and aggregate communities around statements of purpose or ideals. The great success of Creative Commons is that they’ve created both a community and a clear statement that is wrapped up in a couple of logos that (to some extent at least) have clear understood intentions. If we can achieve this for Open Notebook Science then I think that would be a great thing.

Which brings us to the question of why I haven’t used them I guess…Simple answer is that I don’t have access to the style sheets that drive my lab notebook. This is a surprisingly general problem – and also applies to licences. I want to put up some data, so I do it on some service, but that service doesn’t let me put a ccZero licence (e.g. FeedBurner doesn’t have the ability to apply ccZero to your feed although you can use CC-BY). If I don’t have the ability to add it how can I express my wishes? However, that excuse is running a little thin because I’ve learnt enough about stylesheets that I could probably do it now…

How do Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas about the Semantic Web fit into Open Science? Do you take issue with any of his pronouncements and positions?

I absolutely believe in the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data as the way to move forward for describing the outputs of research in the lab. I guess I have two slight differences with TBL. Firstly I am not sure that an exclusive focus on RDF is the best way forward because there is some mileage in other formats that are widely used. They are not as good in the longer term, but they might make a good stepping stone for many cases and we need to solve the problem of transferring lots of legacy data as well.

Where I have a different emphasis to many SemWeb people is that I think our biggest problem is providing tools that capture information and build the links. Generating linked data seems to largely involve a lot of typing of angle brackets or mastering complex software libraries. This is nonsense if we’re going to produce large quantities of linked data. We need tools that help the average user, the average scientist generate and publish data in this form without them having to worry about the details. If it’s further away than a right click then it isn’t going to happen.

If you were to win a MacArthur fellowship, how would you spend the money?

I have to say I’m not actually sure exactly what you get for a MacArthur fellowship but I was thinking about putting in for an ERC Senior Fellowship so let me describe what I was thinking about for that.

Third, get right into the social sciences and look hard at what is happening around us. Really look hard at the different online tools, figure out what is working and what is not, and try to understand why. Look for historical parallels that will help to predict the best way forward. Get a real understanding of the social sciences that can help me to understand developments and push them in the right direction. Get real evidence of what open practices are achieving, and where they work best. Find the low hanging fruit and apply resources where they are most likely to find the big wins.

What is your goal for the next year? The next five?

This year it is to make sure I get you these answers before the year is up! Seriously this year my goals are the same as last year, to make more space and time and find the resources to do some of the things above somehow. Over five years, really the same. I would like to have made a significant impact, for the better, on the way scientists work over that period.

Who are you heroes in science, technology and in any other field on endeavor?

The people who make a difference. I’m not sure I really do have heroes per se. I admire people who think clearly, and who influence my thinking in positive ways but that’s a little circular. As a scientist I guess I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of placing too much of an aura around the person rather than the work. To the extent that I have heroes many of them are the people mentioned above. The ones who have motivated me, through their ideas or their example, to try and make a difference where I can.

You and I both recently attended ScienceOnline2010. Do you consider that a must-attend event for those interested in Open Science? Can you tell us a bit about how you think your own sessions went, which presentations you found most compelling, whom you got a chance to chat with there that you already knew and what new people you met there that interested and impressed you?

I was very happy with the Open Notebook session that I was involved with and less happy with the Wave demo. In retrospect I probably should have shown the canned video demo that I had rather than try and do it live, which is a lesson I will take to other demos. I was really disappointed that I missed sessions by Andy Farke, Pavel Szczesny, Jon Eisen and many others. There was just far too much good stuff going on. I think Science Online is growing into a must-attend event for those interested in how scientific communication is evolving in its widest sense.

For me, I guess I came away with a couple of key ideas about how to distribute data in new ways and a greater appreciation of the challenges of curation in the longer term. But also the potential for connecting things together – a lot of this seems nearly in reach if we could just figure out how to bridge a few more gaps.

Also, some of the librarians at ScienceOnline2010 came away with the impression that some scientists regard libraries as we know them to be increasingly irrelevant. Do you have any suggestions as to how librarians can play a role in Open Science?

The role of “the library” in the 21st century is a source of angst for many people. The broader question really is how do we want to manage information in academia in the future, and what spaces, real or virtual, need to be provided for people to interact with information. A lot of this is virgin territory, so there are massive opportunities for the people and communities who want to get out there and make things happen. Equally, a lot of it is unfamiliar territory for librarians and other information managers. Life is like that.

The other important role is to take a much stronger advocacy role in explaining the true costs of current subscription systems. A central problem with our current structure is that academics are blinded to the costs of their publishing decisions. I think librarians need to be radicalized to take on their own academic staff and make them see and feel the costs of their decisions. I can see that this is both dangerous and scary and also a departure from the traditionally subservient role of library decision making to academic need. But if the current fear is a lack of relevance, then maybe some pain is required to make it clear what the relevance is?

What conferences do you recommend those interested in Open Science attend and where do you plan to appear in coming months? I am looking forward to hearing you speak at the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest February 20, 2010, for instance.

That’s a hard question – Open Science seems to exist on the periphery of mainstream conferences and at the same time to a certain extent in a ghetto of its own. The Science Commons Symposium will be great – and I’m really excited to be there. The Science Online London and Science Online 2011 meetings will be important marking points to look at progress. The SAGE Congress in April in San Francisco will be an exciting place to talk about what is possible today and into the future. But the place to really progress the discussion about Open Science is in the mainstream – by standing up in a conference and giving a talk…and providing a link to the data. By making the underlying code and analysis available and saying so in the paper. By simply raising the bar for what we expect from the communication of good science. Ask the questions – demand the answers and live it out with your own communication to the best of your ability and change Open Science from an activity practiced by fringe lunatics into nothing more than the good practice that we expect.

Thank you for your time, Cameron.

I came to learn of you as I have been trying, as the saying goes, to “wrap my head around” the concepts of Open Science, Open Notebook Science and what seems to be a genuine revolution in scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific information. I have come in the past year or so to learn that there is a core group of people in the vanguard of this movement including Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, Andrew Lang, Michael Nielsen and you.

Open Science seems to me to be a genuinely transformative movement in not only science but in the information sciences and should be of interest to anyone with an interest in scientific research, scientific publishing, academia, scholarly communication, search engines, the relationship of new technologies to mainstream scientific societies, technological innovation, the Semantic Web, big data, social networking in the sciences, new tools for scientific and scholarly collaboration and so on. And throw in the fact that you have managed to create something important with very little (if any) grant funding that caught the attention of and was acquired by the prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry.

We actually did it without any grant funding. ChemSpider was originally started as a hobby project so looking for grant-funding to fund a hobby project per se wouldn’t have been a good basis for any agency to contribute. Can you imagine that exchange with the NSF… “It’s something we’re interested in doing for the benefit of the community so would you mind kicking in a few dollars to cover the costs at least?” A discussion destined for failure. Even much later when we were listed on grant applications with collaborators we unfortunately didn’t get any funding. We did, however, have a number of companies step forward and sponsor the site because we were doing something of value for them, especially when we provided access to the data via a series of web services. Specifically Waters, Thermo, Agilent and Bruker all contributed and we thank them for that. It helped pay for the hardware!

Thus, we have in you we have the story of a basic scientist who also succeeded as a Web entrepreneur on the strength of a way cool tool and the respect you garnered as a scientist and innovator.

Thanks for the kudos. While I am a scientist I think my role over the past decade has been “Idea Guy” and “Connector,” connector being the Malcolm Gladwell sense of the word (The Tipping Point). I know a lot of very able people who are willing to move from the talking stage of doing something to actually getting it done. I’m very opinionated regarding when there is enough talking and thinking about doing something and it’s time to get things done. As I like to say “Try to feed the dog and the dog dies. If you ACTUALLY feed the dog he’ll be fine….but if you only TRY he won’t be.” Over the years I’ve developed a fairly good batting average in terms of starting a project, iterating, revisiting progress, stopping if necessary and redirecting as necessary. It’s my preferred way of working. It’s much easier to run a project this way outside of a structured organization, of course.

I envision as readers of this article all those who are, like me, trying to get a grasp of who’s who in Open Science, anyone who cares about the future of science (and that really should include every human being given the importance science plays a role in practically every breath we take, how long we live and like matters), plus medical, scientific and academic librarians, science educators at all levels, information scientists, computer science students with start-up stars in their eyes, those who love chemistry, those who need to keep up on key developments in the world of search and those who want to gain a better understanding of rather arcane terms such as “the Semantic Web.”

I agree with you…Science touches us all. I was listening today to President Obama commenting about how the USA is lagging behind on math and science skills. I have to agree. I’m British by birth and didn’t get to the states until I was in my early 20s but I’ve been here almost a quarter of a century now and I have sensed a change in the interest in science. We do amazing science in this country, just incredible. I get to meet a lot of kids but I can’t think of one who thinks its “cool and interesting” that I am scientist. Maybe it’s because I don’t mix chemicals anymore and don’t make “stuff.” Science isn’t exposed to the public the way it used to be in my opinion. I think there are a lot of people trying to interest students and making sincere efforts, but I am hoping that the new administration will shine more of a spotlight on the issue of lagging math and science skills and DO something to change it.

One of the pleasures of conducting interviews with brilliant people who create pathbreaking tools is that I get the opportunity to grill them on matters of terminology.

In that tradition, I would like to ask you first to give us a very simple explanation of what ChemSpider is and why non-chemists should know about it. For example, I work in the biomedical sciences and for my own interest follow research developments in the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Much of the work on that disease involves the testing of various chemicals on mouse models to see if they have any effect on preventing or curing the disease or slowing its development. Now, I would think that tools that greatly expedite the work of chemists at a very basic level would benefit clinical researchers down the road. Could you please outline for us why average people who are ill or love people who are should care about ChemSpider and the wider world of Open Science? Does chemistry really matter to those of us who aren’t chemists?

I’ll break this into pieces to answer your questions. Firstly, what is ChemSpider? At present it is primarily a large database of chemicals and related data linked out to the original sources of the data. What we’re been working towards is having ChemSpider be a “structure-centric” resource. If you want to find information associated with a chemical structure/compound and you know either its name(s) or its chemical structure then you can search the database and find associated information and data. The data are of various forms and include lists of chemical identifiers, experimental and predicted properties, analytical data, textual descriptions including synthesis procedures and Wikipedia articles, links to related information and data sources.

In terms of “Does chemistry really matter to those of us who aren’t chemists?” that parallels questions such as “Should we care about Mathematics? Who cares about art or literature?”. While there are of course many issues and side effects of chemistry that have been detrimental to the health of the planet “chemists and chemistry” will be at the forefront of healing the harm we have done. Whether the public are conscious of it or not chemistry continues to bring benefits to society in so many ways in the form of drugs, novel materials for a myriad of applications, for green applications such as battery technologies, biodegradable polymers, safer pesticides, fertilizers and so on. These examples are ones that the public would easily recognize. Chemistry is everywhere and it should matter to all of us.

Now let’s move along to questions of terminology. As I have read around on the Web in preparation for this interview, I have seen ChemSpider characterized in various ways. Could you please define for us the terms I have come across in articles about ChemSpider?

Structure Centric Community
Chemical compounds encompass a broad distribution. There are those that have been fully characterized and defined and can be represented in terms of a chemical structure diagram and in our specific case in the form of a “connection table” of atoms and bonds. There are then those chemicals that are materials with specific compositions, for example minerals, or a distributed composition, for example polymers with a distribution of molecular weights and end groups. ChemSpider presently is limited to dealing with “structures” that can be represented with a connection table. The community aspect is twofold: ChemSpider as a resource is provided for the benefit of the community but we also intend for the community to participate in the enhancement of the data quality and content.

Database
ChemSpider sits of a database of diverse data associated with millions of chemical structures. The database itself is Microsoft SQL Server and what we have done is built a data model onto SQL server and populated the database with chemistry-related content.

As you can see, I am trying to figure out when something is a database and when it is a search engine. I work very happily on ScanGrants, but I still can’t figure out if it is a database or a search engine. We just use the wording, “a public service listing of grants and other funding types.” Could you please delineate for us the differences between a search engine and a database and is ChemSpider both depending on what operation the user is engaged in within it? Could you please give examples of what you would consider a database and what you would consider a search engine?

Interesting question. I think of a database as two things – the technology itself that hosts the content (in our case the database in SQL server) and then the data model and the data populated against the data model. Clearly SQL Server itself is unlikely to be of interest to chemists unless it is holding data of interest to them. A search engine is the manner by which people discover content and relationships that is generally, but not always housed within a database. The utility of ChemSpider is not just limited to searching a database as the platform provides access to a number of tools for the user that still have high value and do not involve performing searches or tapping into the existing data content. For example, we have a services page where a user can draw their own structure (or upload it) and predict a series of physicochemical properties for their structure. This does not depend on the structure being in the database as they are real time predictions and not data look-ups.
Examples of various databases would be eBay, Amazon and Wikipedia – they are all sitting on underlying database technologies and the user is interested in the content within. Clearly they all need to be searchable to retrieve information of interest to the user but they are not search engines per se. To me search engines are the classical internet search engines: Google, Bing and I extend it to include Mapquest/Google Earth.

In your very edifying slideshow, “How Internet Resources Are Providing a Collaborative Community for Chemistry” you have an intriguing slide entitled, “Crowd-sourcing chemistry curation.” Could you please talk about crowd-sourcing in chemistry and tell us if there is something unique to chemistry that makes it particularly suitable to crowd-sourcing or are you with ChemSpider and with your colleagues such as Jean-Claude Bradley creating models of collaboration that could be adopted by other branches of science? It does seem to me that Open Science at this point is of interest primarily to chemists and physicists. Will that always be the case or is there activity in fields such as neuroscience and medicine?

In terms of crowd-sourcing in chemistry our hope is that we can garner the support of the community to populate ChemSpider with their own content so that others can benefit from their skills and interests, the so-called “wisdom of the crowd.” However, since there is already so much data and information on ChemSpider we are also hoping that the community will help us validate and curate the data that is on ChemSpider. With over 20 million chemical entities on the database, many associated with dozens of names and properties, it is not difficult to find a simple misspelling, a property without units or a mis-associated spectrum. This amounts to millions of potential errors that cannot be validated algorithmically or robotically and human eyeballs and skills need to be brought to bear.

Jean-Claude Bradley, JC, is at the forefront of Open Notebook Science and is instigating projects that harness the collective skills of students to measure, publish and collectively validate experimental data. In particular this has been brought to bear recently in his Open Solubility Project where a number of individuals are measuring non-aqueous solubility experimental data and sharing the details and results of their measurements via a wiki. The data are then aggregated and served up the community to reuse and repurpose. Since all experimental data are available via links to the original measurement data, true Open Notebook Science, then erroneous results can be questioned, discussed by the community and highlighted for re-measurement or investigation. JC’s work in this particular area is unique but Open Science has been going on for many years in astronomy where large teams openly share datasets and collaborate. If you consider biology this is already going on through the sharing of massive amounts of biological assay screening data through the PubChem platform. In this way certain labs are screening particular compounds and making the data available and other laboratories are accessing the data and using it to investigate potential lead compounds. The same is true of the Toxcast work funded by the environmental protection agency (EPA) where there screening data are being made available to modelers to investigate algorithm development for example. Open Science is all around us today and only continues to grow in parallel with other areas of openness – Open Source and Open Access.

In that same slideshow, you use the rather intriguing term “lost chemistry.” Please elaborate on that.

I originally heard the term “Lost Chemistry” from a gentleman called Dick Wife. Dick has been running a project for a few years to aggregate from chemistry theses synthetic reaction procedures to build a large database of chemical syntheses. For every published chemical reaction there are many more syntheses reporting the experimental conditions, yields and analytical data that never make it outside of the originating laboratory but can be captured into a thesis. Dick has been heading a project called SORD to aggregate these data into a single database and make it available to the community. If you wish to have free access to the resource then you need to be a participating lab and share your data so that it can be populated into SORD. If you wish to access the data but not be an active contributor then you need to pay to access. This helps capture a lot of “Lost Chemistry.” As an NMR spectroscopist I have the same view of the number of spectra measured in a year around the world that never get reported and simply remain confined to hard drives inside an organization. We hope that people will take advantage of the ChemSpider platform to share their data and help prevent the “loss” of chemistry. Imagine how many experiments have been run in labs around the world where the data/description/conclusions are lost in notebooks on a shelf. I am not talking about long-lost information but data generated in the past couple of years where computer capture and data management capabilities could have helped expose the information. This will change. What we need to catalyze the shift is a couple of prominent thought-leaders in our domain to lead the way.

Again in that slideshow, you state, “ChemSpider accepts public depositions, linking to websites, hosting of details etc. Accepts structures, text, spectra, images.” Could you please give examples of each and discuss the challenges of quality control? How do you handle matters of link rot, for example? How has the acquisition of ChemSpider by the RSC helped you in such matters?

I think I’ve outlined earlier the concept of depositing information onto ChemSpider. We do have people submitting their own chemicals to the database now, regular associations of chemicals with publications, association of spectra etc. We have over 2500 spectra at this point. Quality control is rather simple but is hard work for a number of curators. We have different levels of curators and master curators check the curation efforts of members of the community who are depositing and validating data. Spectra are generally checked within a few hours of being deposited, images are generally checked within a few minutes, chemical names are re-checked within a day etc. Simple comments submitted against chemical records are available for everyone to see and the thousands of historical comments made are all viewable. Bottom line, we recheck everything. We have only had a couple of acts of vandalism and it amounted to people posting funny images (for example, the Katie Crowe incident or the Exploding Mouse). I’d estimate well over 95% of the edits and depositions are correct associations. I would say that 99% of the comments raise appropriate awareness to us regarding issues on a particular record. Overall, this is very impressive.

Link rot is an issue but we try to minimize it. For example, we link as many publications as possible via PubMed ID or, preferably, digital object identifier (DOI) and then use those identifiers to pull back the associated information via the appropriate services. We are at risk of broken links with things like blog posts but we tend to consult the blog for creative commons licensing and respect it, often depositing a relevant blog post onto the database and creating the link out to the originating blog post. If the blog changes later and there is no redirect then we at least do have the original source info on the database to load. Link rot is something we are trying to wrap our head around and in terms of data we foresee that application of DOIs for data, as Thieme have done recently for spectral data, could be an important approach.

You also say, “Blogs should be searchable too.” Are blogs (which can be deleted in seconds by the owners) some of the places that lost chemistry can be found? Are Open Notebooks basically blogs? Or are they wikis? Or what?

There are some wonderful blogs out there for synthetic chemists especially. I like the blog of Paul Docherty and “Milkshake” who runs the Org Prep Daily blog. Paul’s blog is generally a detailed analysis of a particular synthesis with links to the original paper. Milkshake posts details of particular syntheses and a lot of experimental detail. We copy the contents of both to ChemSpider and link out to the original posts. I would call this Lost Chemistry….many people had never heard of these blogs until I started pointing to them. I believe we have driven traffic to them. Open Notebooks could be blogs (like OrgPrepDaily) but in the pure sense of the definition from JC Bradley the wiki format with date and time increments displayed throughout the progress of the work is more appropriate. I would say most ONS pages are wiki-based at present.

One new buzzword is “Linked Data.” Is ChemSpider an exemplar of that concept? How does linked data differ from semantic linking?

For the purists I believe that Linked Data is the exposure of data using semantic web layers such as RDF (Resource Description Framework). For myself I believe that ChemSpider is indeed an example of Linked Data even in its present form. We are not yet exposing RDF on ChemSpider but have had it on our plans to do so. There is, (un)fortunately, always something else waiting for our attention.

In your very interesting slideshow, “Navigating the Complex Web of Chemistry Using ChemSpider,” you state on one slide, “Publishers can enhance their articles…” Could you please elaborate on that and tell us what you see as the value of Elsevier’s Article of the Future project?

The publishers are not naïve in thinking that “publications” are paper-based for not very much longer. So much of their delivery vehicles have had to be reinvented over the past few years as users have come to expect access to electronic forms of the article ahead of paper-based delivery. The American Chemical Society just this year announced the first step to migrate away from paper-based delivery and I’m not aware of any of the Open Access journals delivering a paper-based format. A number of the publishers are already active with delivering enhancements to the articles that can only come by enabling electronic forms of the article. I include the efforts of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). In Chemistry especially the RSC led the cure with their award-winning Project Prospect semantic mark-up project whereby certain terms within the article would be “marked-up” and linked to information such as chemical compound details, definitions in the IUPAC Gold Book etc. The ChemSpider team developed our own version of semantic mark-up, called ChemMantis, and linked out from chemical names, reaction names and biological entities such as proteins, enzymes, bacteria etc out to the associated Wikipedia record. We used the ChemSpider database as the navigating layer to help link from chemical compounds out to chemical vendors, analytical data and related publications. We ended up producing a “ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry” to house Open Access articles submitted to us by the community. Many of these were synthesis procedures and took advantage of our mark-up capabilities to enhance the article.

I believe that Elsevier’s Article of the Future could be a good representation of what electronic articles might look like in the future. I can only envision that the production of such articles will be very labor-intensive for the foreseeable future until processes are optimized and authors assume more of the additional load associated with producing an electronic article of that form. Alternatively, and more likely, an increasing amount of the article formatting will be farmed out overseas due to a more advantageous price point.

What is the ChemSpider Synthesis and what do you mean by “all things synthetic?”

One of the outcomes of our delivery of the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry was a series of submissions of synthesis procedures. By the third issue it was clear that there was a bias to using the platform to expose organic syntheses – short articles explaining particular reaction transformations…generally single step syntheses defining starting materials, products, experimental conditions and associated analytical data. Ultimately, it was turning into a “reaction database” of synthesis procedures. Our intention with ChemSpider Synthesis, an interim name for what we will deliver, will host short articles regarding synthesis. They will be peer-reviewed using a blog-like feedback system where comments will be posted to the article. The community will be asked to contribute to the content and, in parallel, we will harvest synthesis procedures from the RSC archive of many tens of thousands of articles.

Could you please discuss the concept of public peer review and how might that change the current quite rigid tenure system? How do you encourage young scientists to get involved in Open Science in general and ChemSpider in particular? Jean-Claude Bradley seems to excel at outreach to chemistry faculty and young scientists and you to scientific societies, database managers in government and industry and to publishers.

Public peer review is, in many ways, already happening. The blogosphere has fast become an environment where science and publications are openly discussed and critiqued in the public eye. Take for example the recent blog discussions regarding sodium hydride as an oxidant that were conducted on the TotallySynthetic Blog . This blog post openly critiqued science reported in JACS and in the process removed the journal and the authors from the exchange. Since such “peer review” is already occurring online, and the example given is not the only one, the near future will see peer review and commentaries being posted directly to a publication online similar to what we are seeing already in the blogosphere. Authors will be held accountable to their work not only by original peer reviewers but also by the community at large. This will take some gentle navigation in the early days to deal with potential flame wars and open attacks but ultimately is likely to become mainstream and expected from the publishers. Personally I believe it will be quite some time before such openness will have an impact on the tenure system and such a system is entrenched, in my opinion, in local organization politics and relationships over productivity and scientific impact. At the end of the day interpersonal relationships and conformance to an organization’s expectations and needs will define tenure conversion.

Speaking of Jean-Claude Bradley, could you please give us your views as to who excels at what vis-à-vis raising the public profile of Open Science? Do you agree with my characterizations here:

Jean-Claude Bradley: The main conduit and public face of Open Science to working chemists in academia. Ambassador and guide to Open Science to non-scientists. Explicator extraordinaire on the actual practices and value of Open Science and Open Notebook Science in particular.

JC is like the “billboard of ONS” and I mean that in a positive way. He speaks from the heart regarding his passion for ONS, he demonstrates true value and benefits to the approach, has brought together a team of disparate collaborators to produce demonstrations regarding what openness, services and a willing group of people can produce as an outcome. JC focuses his efforts on spreading the word, takes no offense when people don’t support the direction and knows that, ultimately, ONS will have a growing prominence in the future.

Cameron Neylon: Tools meister and theory man. Connector to industry (e.g., Google vis-à-vis Google Wave, and Elsevier.) Tireless and charismatic advocate and astute analyst of key developments in Open Science.

Cameron is a connector too. He is passionate about Open Science and a masterful communicator. Some of his blog posts for me are very much “I wish I’d said that…” in nature. Cameron has a way of bringing clarity to the challenges we face, offering some solutions but in a way that he is not wedded to his approach but to a solution. He is a bridge-builder and, in my opinion, single-handedly got science and Google Wave connected efficiently with the Google staff. There are many people discussing Google Wave and a number of people working with the technology but Cameron has marshaled us into action. He is a trusted evangelist for how such solutions can be applied to science and has the ear of many people, mine included. I just wish we could do more faster to support his vision!

Michael Nielsen: Thinker and theoretician on Open Science of a philosophical bent.

As with most people I have met who are involved with Open Science Michael is passionate, opinionated, thoughtful and fearless. I’ve met Michael only on two occasions, one of these where we shared the podium at the Library of Congress. His presentation was reflective in a way that it calmly called us to attention and action around Open Science. He has the ear of the publishers and some of his blog posts have the community listening, wondering, concerned and optimistic all at the same time. It depends on WHO you are in the community! As I am now in publishing this post was particularly interesting.

Andrew Lang: Supporter of all of the above and master of the nuts and bolts of the tools and technologies of Open Science.

It’s been many years since I saw the A-Team (but I hear they are making a new movie!) but if you ever saw it you’ll remember that you could lock the team in an old garden shed and with baling twine, an old lawnmower and a deck chair they’d be able to make a top notch speed racer. Andy is that character in the world of plugging together online resources to the benefit of those doing Open Science. He’s worked with JC Bradley and used Google Docs, Web Services and Open Data to publish a book on Open Solubility Data on Lulu. The paper co-authored with JC regarding Chemistry in Second Life does a great job in detailing how he is a plumber using the necessary tools to get a result. We’ve worked together with ChemSpider and the Open Spectral Data on the database to create the Spectral Game, both 1D and 2D . Andy is fast, efficient and not shy…I appreciate him asking us for things he needs…it improves our services and he gets to give away to the community for the benefit of all.

Bora Zivkovic: Organizer of the key Conference ScienceOnline (where you will give a presentation this year on ChemSpider) and influential blogger.

Bora is wonderfully influential, easy to talk to, very connected and prolific. He is very valuable to me keeping me connected to what’s going on in the world of science through his tireless communication via all of the delivery systems he uses. He is a master of the social network and a true evangelist for online science. You’ve seen how much work he has done on his blog so far to draw attention to ScienceOnline. While he is not the only one working on it he has a very loud voice, in a good way, in drawing attention to the conference. It’s been fully booked for months…and in this economy. It lends credence to the quality of the meeting as well as to how Science Online is becoming more high profile. Good!

Antony Williams (that’s you): Builder, innovator and creator of key tool of Open Science, ChemSpider. Master of building basic platforms of Open Science and standard science and adroit and effective leader of outreach to mainstream scientific societies and organizations.

Is that about right or am I way off here?

I’d define myself as an Idea Guy with a try-it-and-see mentality. I’ve worked in government labs, in academia, in Fortune 500 corporate America, in small start-up transitioned to established presence. I now work for a British publisher and have owned two of my own companies. There is a place for ideas in all places of course but the smaller the organization the more likely it is that you can run in many directions trying out various things. In our domain that only holds true if it requires sweat and intellect and not capital investments. So much was possible with ChemSpider because the platform was cheap and the investment was intellectual sweat. I still like to try out many ideas in parallel if they have low time investments. Some of the greatest pay-off projects I’ve ever been involved with come from such investigations. There are others who I judge work in a similar way and getting a lot done with minimal resources…Andy Lang, Rich Apodaca and Egon Willighagen among them.

Despite my recent roles that have been more business oriented I still think of myself as a scientist and try to keep my hand into NMR though it’s limited today to software algorithms for NMR prediction and computer assisted structure elucidation. There’s a list of my papers on Mendeley and a couple of new ones in preparation now. I am fortunate that I have remained engaged with ACD/Labs at a technical level and get to work with some of the best intellect in the world in terms of NMR prediction and structure elucidation algorithms. I believe that to improve it is best to surround myself with people I can learn from and that invigorates my grey matter!

Could you please discuss the concept of ChemSpider Everywhere and how ChemSpider is linked to from blogs and provide examples of open source applets and ChemMobi—in the latter case could you provide us a scenario of how a scientist might use ChemMobi while, say, in the audience at a talk at a scientific conference or in a chat with a graduate student during a chance encounter in the hallway of a chemistry building?

The concept behind ChemSpider Everywhere is that our web services will allow those systems and scientists needing access to ChemSpider resources will be able to get to them. I’m living a kind of “Intel Inside” mentality where structural information based on curated dictionaries connected to associated data can be fed into systems as necessary. Where is this happening already? Our web services are already integrated to mass spectrometry software from Bruker, Agilent, Waters and Thermo. There is interest in tapping ChemSpider to retrieve chemical structures associated with mass spectral data so they will fire off a file from their processing software and hit a subset of the ChemSpider database, generally a set of databases containing drug-related and metabolism information (KEGG, Drugbank, Human Metabolome Database etc). When they hit the database with a query for monoisotopic masses and narrow the search on these databases they will generally retrieve an appropriate set of hits and these are not just structures to embed into their software but links to ChemSpider with all of its rich resources.

Our intentions is that ChemSpider will be everywhere…in an appropriate manner supporting the community. We welcome more ideas of what that would look like…but are not short of our own!

What is an InChl and what is an InChl Resolver and why are they important?

An InChI is an international chemical identifier and is a way to represent a chemical structure in alphanumeric text. A very basic definition is on Wikipedia and that gives some basic figures showing how a chemical structure breaks down into a series of alphanumeric layers to describe the complexity of a chemical structure. ChemSpider was built on InChIs as a way to deduplicate structures and allow fast structure searching. InChI is becoming part of the connection network for chemistry online and I provided an overview of both internet-based chemistry and how InChIs are important to creating a structure searchable internet in a recent presentation to Drexel university students (available as a video on SciVee).

From my initial blog post we took the feedback and with the kind support of the RSC we went off and built an example of a resolver. It’s a proof of concept and what is necessary is really a federated approach where multiple resolvers can be integrated. We are presently in discussions about this with other parties and a federated resolver will be available, in proof of concept form, later this year.

Could you please discuss your work with Wikipedia and your reactions to its recent move to be less open and more reliant on expert editing? Is that a good thing or bad thing vis-à-vis ChemSpider and for society at large and for Wikipedia itself?

The best overview about starting the work was written almost two years ago now. What was initiated after a conversation with Martin Walker from the Wikipedia Chemistry team was a project whereby we would examine every chemical compound on Wikipedia, atom by atom, bond by bond, and validate the correctness of the displayed structure relative to its association with the chemical name, the CAS number, the PubChem link and other related data. What started out as a project that might take a couple of months is only now nearing completion. It has involved discussions literally down to a single stereo bond as it did with Tacrolimus.

I confess that I am only slightly aware of the situation of Wikipedia becoming less open and more controlled in its editing. On ChemSpider we have always had users, curators and master curators, proactively acknowledging skills upfront and giving more responsibilities to certain parties. This has worked pretty well for us. Wikipedia should be grateful to all contributors. Certainly the contributions of experts to validating and enhancing articles will be very important. Personally I think articles on Wikipedia are, in general, very useful when they are more than stubs.

Could you please discuss ChemSpider’s relations with PubMed and other services of the National Library of Medicine?

Our relationships to date are simply those of using PubMed services/API to access information and data to link up to ChemSpider. PubMed is truly an amazing resource and our connection last year delivered at the ACS really raised some eyebrows regarding what’s possible as a result of integrating public resources with the appropriate programming interfaces.

How is it going with the RSC? Do you have any advice for those who have created Open Science tools that start to garner interest and acquisition offers from mainstream publishers and scientific societies?

It took a while to migrate the ChemSpider platform into the RSC environment. We were moving the system from three fairly nominal servers running in a basement to an infrastructure based on virtual servers. We also moved from a “continuous beta” where we were updating code to the live environment on a regular basis to an environment where we had development servers, test servers and live servers. This migration took a while but the benefits are that we have full IT support now and are not carrying all the responsibilities for maintaining the hardware, the backups, the core software platform (SQL server, IIS etc). We also have less risk in terms of power outages and the pipes serving up ChemSpider are much thicker. The benefits to the user are obvious…better uptime and faster overall response from the site.

In terms of people who have created Open Science tools and want to garner interest in terms of acquisition my suggestion may be quite contrary. Don’t pursue the sell off as the endgame but build the appropriate solution for your users, develop a following and let your success speak for itself. I believe that’s what we did well…we created a solution of value to the community, stayed focused and on task and let the community speak on our behalf regarding the value of what we were building. Hopefully the publishers and societies are watching and will engage.

What are you most proud of vis-à-vis ChemSpider? What have been the biggest challenges since you started working on it and what has been particularly gratifying about the relationship with the RSC? What are your plans, if any, for expansion in the US?

I am most proud of the fact that we stayed true to our vision of “Building a structure centric community for chemists.” We have been upfront and honest in all of our discussions with our users and the community via the blog and on many other public forums. I believe that we have earned the respect of our users and am humbled by the number and quality of scientists who have been willing to support and work with us.

We have no immediate plans to expand in the US at present and need to balance expansion of the ChemSpider resources with overall project needs. Our team is not involved only with the delivery of ChemSpider but with a number of other projects to support cheminformatics within the organization.

What scientific conferences do you recommend that young scientists interested in Open Science attend?

You and I will both be at ScienceOnline2010 in January 2010. That would be a good one for exposing people to what’s going on with Science Online, much of it Open. Many of the major conferences in any of the sciences now have sessions regarding data sharing and Open Science..it’s just a matter of looking for the session. Certainly my experiences with the Google SciFoo camp, one I was fortunately invited to on two occasions, was one of exposure to a lot of Open Science…unfortunately it’s invitation only.

What blogs should they read? Yours for one, right?

Mine is at http://www.chemspider.com/blog/. In recent months I have stopped visiting my RSS reader as much and look for what dribbles onto Twitter from the blogs and navigate over. Ones that I visit regularly are 1) Science in the Open from Cameron Neylon, 2) Useful Chemistry from JC Bradley, 3) Michael Nielsen’s blog, 4) John Overington’s CHEMBl’og, 5) the Mendeley Blog and 6) ALL of David Bradley’s blogs. I read a lot of others also, but this is a short list.

Whom should they follow on Twitter?

I’d suggest following David Bradley, Timo Hannay, Duncan Hull, Egon Willighagen, Cameron Neylon, Rafael Sidi and Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine). What these gents have to say is specific to my mixed domain of cheminformatics and publishing so may not be of interest to chemists directly.

Should they immediately jump into the lively Life Scientists room on FriendFeed?

As with all forms of social networking tools online I would say that people need to have an interest in such an environment to begin with. Many people don’t read blogs yet, many are unaware of what RSS feeds are, Twitter would be an annoyance and FriendFeed just one more on the list. It is a very small fraction of the community that is using these tools but it is growing of course. I find FriendFeed of value to ask questions and engage a group of domain experts in discussion but the reality is that, for me, this is a tight knit community and I could engage the majority of them directly by email. I believe that Cameron Neylon and JC Bradley have had success in using FriendFeed to initiate projects and activities around funding applications. The truth is that there are so many groups to interact with and so many activities already underway for ChemSpider that I have backed away a little from all of these tools of late just because of time limitations. I’m focusing instead on building closer working relationships with a select group of people with whom I can get things done and produce an outcome or measurable output. I found that I was losing a lot of time in a week on conversations that didn’t lead anywhere. An interesting discussion was recently started here.

What are your plans for ChemSpider for the next year? For the next five?

ChemSpider was conceived in December 2006 and released to the public at the Spring ACS in Chicago in 2007. In terms of a functional system it’s less than 3 years old and having a 5 year vision would be as simple as having chemists think of ChemSpider as their first port of call to source information about “chemicals” as well as host information about chemistry. Information about chemicals will include properties, data, associated literature, suppliers, associated scientists, Open Notebook Science pages, links to information in other databases and data sources and so on. Hosting information about chemistry will include the chemical substance itself but also associated data, synthetic procedures, analytical data etc. generated within a scientist’s laboratory. If we can make this happen at a minimum then we have delivered a foundation dataset and appropriate set of web services to feed the developing semantic web for chemistry. In so doing we will have, hopefully, delivered one of the primary search engines supporting internet-based chemistry.

Finally, who are your heroes in chemistry, science generally, academia, technology and in any other aspect of life?

My heroes in chemistry are people who I believe have directly mentored me in a way that has led to an improvement in my understanding of some aspect of my work. In this list I include Gary Martin who has taught me much about NMR spectroscopy (and we have published a lot together!), Keith Preston, my PostDoc supervisor, now retired, who taught me much about how to question experimental observations and Mike Detty and Steve Godleski who I worked with at Kodak running many midnight experiments just out of interest and passion. I’m sure that none of these people will be recognizable names for your audience.

I’m also hoping to use some of my energy to raise some money for asthma as one of our sons is asthmatic. If anyone out there is connected into the asthma not for profits and can connect me up that would be great. Let’s see how it goes!

Thank you for your time, Dr. Williams.