Monday 19 October 2009

Recent economic data indicate trends that will shape the future ranking of global economic leaders. Over the next several years developing economies such as China and India, are expected to continue their dramatic growth. These developments are influencing global companies to realign their businesses and operational planning in order to establish increased presence in these developing markets. This trend is already visible among leading publishers. This talk by the Vice President of Market Intelligence for the Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters highlights economic performance indicators as well as other significant market drivers such as the availability of a highly skilled and educated workforce capable of fulfilling a variety of professional jobs, including information and publishing roles.

The broad trends of technological advance, globalisation, social networking and information proliferation present many threats and opportunities for the STM industry. Driven by information overload, pressures for increased productivity and compliance, ever increasing stakes and coupled with budget pressures exacerbated by the global economic crisis, customer information needs are radically changing. The new semantic technologies promise step change in productivity improvement, presenting opportunities for STM players to dramatically increase the value of their content, making it an inherent and crucial part of user workflows. To meet the challenges of this evolving environment, leading players need to transition their role from traditional publishers to information solution providers. This transformation will require them to collaborate closely with customers, learn to partner with technology providers and competitors and step outside their comfort zone in solution development and selling.

Why prefer commercial database vendors and pay for information when there is so much information for free on the Web? Quality makes the difference! Quality in the information workflow directly influences the precision and recall of search results. Quality assurance is required over the entire information workflow and includes database producers, vendors and searchers. Quality criteria are discussed, such as:

• Databases: current and comprehensive coverage of their field; transparency of the content selection and the intellectual value-add.
• Vendors/Hosts: provision of synergy from databases of different provenance; reliable operations and secure access; sophisticated and transparent retrieval, evaluation, analysis and reporting tools; efficient customer support.
• Searchers: information competence, ie. familiarity with their company's research topics, sophisticated information tools and the specifics of databases.

Information professionals and intellectual property professionals depend on the quality information products from commercial vendors to deliver to their organisations the quality needed for business critical research and decisions. The presentation emphasises the importance of quality in the professional information workflow, provides relevant examples and aims to stimulate the discussion of this important topic within the community.

Online chemistry resources have expanded dramatically in the past few years with resources such as PubChem, ChEBI, Wikipedia, ChemSpider and many others offering rich resources to scientists seeking data and information. ChemSpider has become one of the primary chemistry portals delivering a heterogeneous mix of Open and Closed data. ChemSpider offers a structure-centric community for collaboration enabling the crowd-sourced deposition and validation of online chemistry data. ChemSpider has also been integrated into the ChemMantis system - CHEMistry Markup And Nomenclature Transformation Integrated System. This platform facilitates entity extraction of science related terms using both heuristics and highly curated dictionaries. The resulting documents are marked up to allow viewing of chemical structures linked out to over 150 different data sources via the ChemSpider database.

This work updates a previous comparative study of selected public and commercial bioactive chemistry databases ( PMID: 17897036). After filtration to facilitate direct content comparison, the pair-wise overlap between over 20 databases and subsets was determined and changes between 2006 and 2008 were also compared. While all compound sets had increased PubChem has doubled over this period. Our comparison shows not only overlap but also unique content across all sources attributable to different strategies for data extraction. Venn diagrams showed extensive overlap between compounds extracted from journals by independent curation by GVKBIO, WOMBAT (both commercial) and BindingDB (public) but each included a proportion of unique content. In contrast, the approved drug collections from GVKBIO, MDDR (commercial) and DrugBank (public) showed a surprising degree of non-overlap. The results show that PubChem has covered an increasing proportion of the compounds in commercial sources over the last two years. However, commercial products continue to extract compounds from patents and journals at a larger scale as well as capturing a significant proportion of unique content. This work thus demonstrates not only an expansion of bioactive chemical information space but also that both commercial and public sources are complementary for its exploration.

Blogs have now become an accepted part of publishing. Many scientists, researchers and industry experts are using blogs to share their work and thoughts with others. But what of Twitter, a micro-blogging service? Is it just for telling the whole world what you have had for breakfast, or seeing pictures of Stephen Fry stuck in a lift? Both blogs and Twitter are excellent ways of keeping up to date with colleagues, monitoring events and opinions in your sector, and for making new contacts. Unfortunately, there is also a considerable amount of rubbish. This presentation demonstrates how to use both as sources of useful information and intelligence, and looks at tools that can help find the gold amongst the dross.

Identifying new patents is a crucial activity for scientists to monitor competitors, understand chemical space and report new molecular targets. Pfizerpedia Patents Semantic Media Wiki provides a novel way to distribute and visualise the information traditionally delivered via an Excel spreadsheet. The original delivery format is limiting and there have been many requests to have the information available in a searchable database. The Excel sheets with their chemical structures are automatically converted into a "database" which can be simply viewed and interrogated. It will also allow scientists to "tag" patents of their own interest, and generate alerts on specific types of patents that may be published in the future.

Semantic MediaWiki is Free Open Source Software and allows Pfizer to use class-leading software without licensing and support costs. Semantic MediaWiki also allows the development of an application without software development or customisation, reducing the build and support costs

Web 2.0 and other new technologies potentially can bring beneficial changes in the access to, use and re-use of journal and database content by chemists. However, it is widely believed that chemists are slow in adopting change although so far there has been little factual evidence to support this This project set out to make a snapshot of scholarly communication practices of chemists by undertaking a series of individual interviews with key decision makers and then conducting an online survey to identify the specific requirements of chemistry researchers and teachers. The defined requirements were then matched to an up-to-date list (also developed as part of the project) of new and recent developments in methods of scholarly communication used by chemists. This presentation will give a summary of the research findings and present ideas for improving the situation. Comparison will be made with a parallel study of economists.

This presentation covers developments in the past year across the chemical information industry in linking together related information by the adoption and implementation of standards. This includes developments across publishers to link compounds via the InChI standard, updates on work by software vendors such as Microsoft where they relate to the share and capture of chemical information, and a selection of academic and other research projects that are working to increase the availability, discovery and re-use of open data. All of these will have an impact on the how information professionals find what they need in years to come, but is choice always better? Are we at a tipping point when the tools and approaches common within bioinformatics finally cross over into chemistry and provide compelling use cases?