Chemistry Wide Open

The NPR interview on Open Science I discussed two weeks ago has aired and is now available. I think it was very well balanced. The positive aspects of not losing failed experiments was weighed against the difficulties in publishing in some journals and of deriving profit.

Yesterday, I gave my first talk at the March07 ACS meeting on Teaching Organic Chemistry with Blogs and Wikis. The screencast is now available.
It was part of a symposium on Using Social Networking Tools to Teach Chemistry organized by Harry Pence and Andrea Gay. Joanna Scott gave a most interesting talk about Nature's experimentation with Second Life and the great possibilities for communicating research work. Harry is also involved with Second Life.

I realize that the audience for this blog tends to be more broad based than on UsefulChem but once in a while I'll throw in an organic chemistry puzzle to see if there are any organic chemists out there lurking.
Ever since we isolated our Ugi products, we've been trying to cyclize them to the diketopiperazines. As described by Hulme, we are trying to effect an intramolecular transamidation catalyzed by trifluoroacetic acid (TFA).

Last week I had the pleasure of getting interviewed by Janet Babin at the WHYY studio in Philly. Janet is putting together a piece on Open Notebook/Open Source Science for her Marketplace series on NPR.
It was encouraging to see how much interest is being generated on this topic lately, especially in the popular media.

The way people search for and find chemistry information is always in flux.
Right now, Open Access is a hot topic (e.g. Open Source Archivangelism post) and it is interesting to see how those seeking OA sources are connecting with those who choose to share information in that way.