Numbers are copyrighted?

I just read on Planet Blue Obelisk Peter’s disturbing news (via Suber) that Wiley thinks it can copyright a set of numbers (also known as data). That is a sad milestone in scientific publishing. It reminds me of the recent internet hype about a long number recently flooding the internet (and notably del.icio.us) related to watching DVDs you legally bought. Some details can be found in this Linux Weekly News article on How Debian packages a number.

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Added my hCard to my blog

Getting back on microformats (see yesterday), I added my hCard to the bottom of my blog:

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Microformats in chemistry...

Peter blogged some days ago about microformats and how they could be used in chemistry. Being late and a bit absent minded, I added a short comment that Chemical blogspace supports microformats for chemistry, and that chemistry is harvested from that, and actually semantically distributed again using CMLRSS.

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Preparing a Chemoinformatics workshop

After handing in a new draft of my PhD manuscript with my co-promotors last friday, and a week before we leave for Sweden, it is time to start finishing up the material for my one hour workshop on chemoinformatics in general and QSAR/QSPR in particular for the Bioclipse Workshop.

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Cb comments for InChI's

About a year ago Pedro wrote a Greasemonkey script to add comments from PostGenomic.com to table of contents of scientific journals. Noel extended it with support for Chemical blogspace (see also this earlier item). Now, the later website is maintained by me, and I extended the aggregator software with molecule support, for example to show hot molecules on the frontpage (at some point my patches will be backported into mainstream. Euan, why not invite me to London HQ in, say, June?).

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Ex-CUBIC get-together

Yesterday and today I was in Cologne to meet with other ex-CUBIC researchers from Christoph’s research group on chemoinformatics (and with Alexandr). Not all former group members where there, but on the other hand we were complemented with Pascal:

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Bioclipse now allows QSAR descriptor selection

In preparation for the Embrace Workshop for Bioclipse in May, I am working on the QSAR functionality of Bioclipse. A nice extension point got set up some time ago, called DescriptorProvider, and implemented by plugins to allow calculation of one or more descriptors for the selected molecules. Now, the functionality for the resulting matrix has been around for some time too.

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