The eNanoMapper project deliverables

This is a bit of an administrative post and historic, but keep coming back to the question, where are all the deliverable of the (past) project. Now, since many eNanoMapper project deliverables were public, we were able to release most of them on Zenodo. This post makes an overview. 3 minute read

AI Technologies in Academia

I have had the Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia from June 27 open for some time now. I thought I wanted to sign it, but got stuck on the first paragraphs multiple times: 7 minute read

Integrating comments via the Fediverse

My old blog had (has) comments via the Blogger.com platform, but I did not have anything for the new blog. A couple of options are used, like Disqus and comments via GitHub. However, these both have the downside of a vendor lock-in and the whole point of moving my blog was to break out from such lock-ins. 1 minute read

The Internet Journal of Chemistry

The Internet Journal of Chemistry (IJC, issn:1099-8292) was one of the first scientific journals to get published on the world wide web (part of the Internet), see doi:10.1080/00987913.2000.10764578. Issues were published from 1998 to 2004. But because it predates systematic archiving of webpages by libraries, a lot is lost. The nature of the journal, however, makes it unique, and quite a number of articles are cited a lot, and should be part of the scientific record. But I soon realized it actually is quite hard to track down content of the journal. I knew some articles have been author accepted manuscripts online. One of that was my own first (and single) author-article, self-archived on Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.1495470), green open access style. 3 minute read

One Million IUPAC names #4: a lot is happening

A lot is happening. If you have been following this project more closesly, you may have already seen some interesting updates, but I will post it here too. First, a quick recap. In March I started a new Blue Obelisk project to collect CCZero IUPAC names from primary literature (paper still pending). It turned out we can automate that, while legally not violating any laws or licenses. In April I reported on some tweaks boosting the efficiency of the use of the API. I also reported on some possible further steps, including how to use the extracted names to create a larger set. Indeed, in June I could report to have passed the 200k IUPAC names, which with the idea from April gave us more than 1M IUPAC names. 4 minute read

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