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This article conflates a lot of different “open” ideas. Open access journals, machine readable datasets, standardized data representation, open community engage
by 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
This article conflates a lot of different “open” ideas. Open access journals, machine readable datasets, standardized data representation, open community engagement, etc. Each of which is challenging on its own, let alone hoping to tackle all at once.
Chemistry has the blessing and the curse of being an older disciple. Fundamentals have not changed in decades. If you grab an organic chemistry text from the 70s, I guess you would be missing on some cutting edge reactions, and you would be using hilariously obsolete analytical techniques, but the synthesis is going to be the same.
Which is to say, that I do not believe chemistry is particularly held back at this point. I think the author was angling for, “Would it not be great if we had standardized, digitized chemistry reaction libraries so we could have an AlphaFold moment?” Which sure, but someone is going to have to fund the effort of digitizing decades of chemistry knowledge.
- slashdave 2y agoWe already have standardized, digital chemistry reaction libraries (reaxys, scifinder). They cost money, but are heavily used by organic chemists.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoMore the focus on open libraries. I am not aware of anything of significant size, but I have not been in the space for a while.
- slashdave 2y agoThere are attempts. https://open-reaction-database.org https://open-reaction-database.org