Nature has a special feature on data sharing, including an editorial and commentaries advocating for both pre- and post-publication of data. I have long been an advocate of data sharing, especially in the post-publication sense (I would argue this is really concurrent-publication data sharing) – and one can read my latest commentary in the Journal of Cheminformatics (DOI: 10.1186/1758-2946-1-2.

Data sharing has been slow in chemistry. Peter Murray-Rust and Henry rzepa have been the major advocates for enhanced publication – see their blogs (PMR and HSR) and lots of publications. Tony Williams (blog) has been advocating for more deposition of data within ChemSpider, and some positive response have occurred. But journals and AUTHORS have been slow to change – supporting materials is often lacking important information and is rarely of useful form – and I consider pdf to be just a slice above “non-useful”. We need to continue to evangelize this issue!

Another diversion from the main theme of this blog.

I have been an advocate for a revolution in chemistry publication making use of the technologies available on the net. My latest polemic on this topic is “Chemistry publication – making the revolution” (DOI: 10.1186/1758-2946-1-2) where I advocate for inclusion of more data within articles, enhancing the reader experience by being able to manipulate the data in the same way that the author did. I argue for development of tools that will enable publication of data, along with chemical semantics. Peter Murray-Rust has blogged on perhaps the first step in this direction: Chem4Word.

I ran across a very interesting article on a similar topic in Learned Publishing. The article is “Semantic Publishing: the coming revolution in scientific journal publishing” by David Shotten (DOI: 10.1087/2009202, also available from this repository). Shotten is in the zoology department and so comes to the semantic web with a different perspective, yet arrives at a similar place that I and Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa (and other chemists) have been advocating. Shotten advocates for “live data” and semantic markup – and cites Project Prospect (the RSC markup of chemical documents built on PMR’s work) as an example of this. Shotten includes a link to a sample zoology article that his group has “enhanced” and there are a lot of clever additions that chemistry publishers would be well served to examine – links to data, cloud tagging, customizable references, etc. Check out the enhanced document here.

Perhaps a growing push for “enhanced publication” from many disciplines will spur on action among the major publishers!