Archiving, but not really

Mike Taylor wrote up a post about the various things a journal article is doing, the first being a scientific report. We put a lot of money in establishing a scientific track record. In the past 30 years how we publish our research and how we archive it has changed significantly. If you read my blog more often, you know I have been critical of the performance of many publishers. Springer Nature was so disappointing that after 5 years I stepped down as Editor-in-Chief (of two) of the Journal of Cheminformatics. There is so much that must be done better. 2 minute read

PFAS in the blood of the Dutch population

A recent report by the Dutch RIVM, PFAS in the blood of the Dutch population (doi:10.21945/RIVM-2025-0094), writes that seven PFAS compounds are found in blood samples of all tested people. Another nine compounds are found in at least 1-in-10 people. Because there is relevant data in the report on the 28 studied PFAS compound, I wanted to have the report more FAIR than it is on the website. Why this report? Well, the chemistry and the history is fascinating and brutal (I like this Veritasium video). 5 minute read

Curation is an essential part of doing research

Depending on your exact definition of doing science, keeping track as precise as possible of your observations is an essential part of doing science. The precision should be high enough that mistakes are obvious. This pattern is, of course, not limited to doing science and we see this in open source development too. Unfortunately, in the modern way of doing science, this is not getting the attention it should get. Worse, with narratives (stories) about the research, in the form of journal articles, are generally considered more important that a precise description of the observations. 4 minute read

All BioHackrXiv preprints and BioHackathon RSS feeds

One thing I was still missing in BioHackrXiv was a place with an overview of: 1. all biohackathons, 2. all preprints linked to a biohackathon, 3. an RSS feed for new papers of a biohackathon. Of course, there is the BioHackrXiv discover service, but the biohackathon is not a metadata field and I cannot filter based on it. And, of course, there is Scholia, but not all preprints are notable (so far, a good number had CiTO annotation that at least made them somewhat notable). Thus, they are not all listed in this venue page and neither on this overview of collections of preprints linked to BioHackathon Europe meetings. 1 minute read

One Million IUPAC names #3: the 200 thousand milestone and 1 million IUPAC names

I could not find the time earlier to report (reason), but three weeks ago we passed the fourth milestone release of the CCZero IUPAC names found in literature collection. This release contains 200026 IUPAC names, 168702 unique names, reflecting 116207 unique InChIKeys. Time for an update of the One Million IUPAC names project. 3 minute read

Retracted articles cited in Wikipedia

Last week, the Wikidata and Sister Projects event tooks place. The presentations are recorded, and I strongly encourage you to check the schedule. One presentation I liked (there are more), was the one by Mike Peel with the title “Best practices for reusing Wikidata’s data in the Wikimedia Projects”. At some point he walks us through the {{Cite Q}} template, around 26:07. 5 minute read

ICCS2025: back in Noordwijkerhout

This week the 13th International Conference on Chemical Structures took place (see also this Scholia overview or this overview of the full ICCS history). This is the conference I first joined 20 years ago as a PhD student presenting a poster (see these past blog posts). Of course, I am actually co-organizer nowadays (actually, co-treasurer). Organizing a meeting with just over 200 participants, and I like to thank Gerard and Willem in particular, but also Pieter, Marcus, Frank, Jenke, and Frans Koeman who has helped us during the past three events. 1 minute read