ABSTRACT

The challenges of sharing research in chemistry are introduced via the molecule and how its essential information features might be formalized. The review then covers a period of around 33 years, describing how scientists used to share information about the molecule, and how that sharing has evolved during a period that has seen the widespread introduction of several disruptive technologies. These include e-mail and its now ubiquitous attachment, the world wide web and its modern expression via blogs and wikis. The review describes how digital documents have similarly evolved during this period, acquiring in some cases digital rights management, metadata and most recently an existence in the cloud. The review also describes how the dissemination of digital research data has also changed dramatically, the most recent innovation being data repositories, and speculates what the future of sharing research via the latest disruptive technology, tablets, might be.

Introduction

Chemistry is widely considered to stand at the crossroads of many disciplines, with signposts to molecular, life, materials, polymer, environmental and computer sciences, as well as to physics and mathematics, and even art and design. To collaborate and share research data and ideas across these areas, research scientists must strive (and do not always succeed) to find common languages to express their intended concepts. In reality, even different scientific dialects can be a challenge, since the semantics of multi-disciplinary areas of research are rarely defined accurately or fully enough for people to cope with the ambiguities and subtleties. The modern digital information age has promised a revolutionary approach to these challenges, the latest incarnations being the formation of social networks to facilitate the interaction. This chapter will present a perspective on some of these aspects from my personal point of view as a research chemist. There are many crossroads at which one could stand: I can only follow the sage advice of Yogi Berra: ‘When one comes to a fork in the road one should take it’! Here I will take the fork to molecular sciences.