The ChemSpider Journal and ChemMantis

The ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry is about to go live. This is not just another chemistry journal. Not only does it boast the option of an open peer-review in addition to Open Access, but it takes us tantalizing closer to the promise of Web3.0: the semantic web. This is achieved by a sophisticated mark-up system generated by ChemMantis. The automatic identification of molecules is impressive enough. But it also marks up functional groups, reactions, spectral data and even biological entities.

For an example consider this article, which was actually a proposal that I wrote with Rajarshi Guha and Tony Williams. Simply by hovering over the marked-up text "Ugi reaction", it pulls up a brief summary from Wikipedia. What makes this semantic is that it already knows that this is a chemical reaction and not a molecule or a virus.

When you hover over the name of a molecule it knows to render it accordingly and provide appropriate links. Consider this example:
This makes the experience of reading a chemistry article a lot richer. But another payoff is coming in what machines will do when they are able to associate concepts instead of just text. Most importantly it does not require authors to do any extra work.

Tony has more information on his blog - and new submissions are welcome.