Abstract:

Introduction

Since August 1999, we initiated the MolBank section of Molecules (http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/, ISSN 1420-3049) at the http://www.molbank.org server as a substructure searchable electronic journal in chemistry. All the published compounds can be readily searched on the website www.molbank.org by 2D substructure search.

At the very beginning in 1997, we launched the MolBank section of Molecules where small pieces of experimental work of individual compound preparation and structural characterization can be rapidly and easily published in the MolBank column of the monthly chemistry journal Molecules³ , ⁴ , ⁵ , ⁶ . So far more than 125 short notes of the MolBank column have been published up to November 1999. Now it is ready for handling a very large number of short notes by fully electronic online submission, refereeing and editor-author communication as well as the final production at its own http://www.molbank.org server.

Many small pieces of very useful experimental findings cannot find a way to be formally recorded in the literature. This is a tremendous loss of useful chemical information. We believe the way to publish the MolBank column in Molecules is a very significant step towards the preservation of the information aspect of molecular diversity of precious experimental findings and an interesting experiment in electronic publishing. We would like to discuu it and hope more journals can join us to publish electronically the experimental findings.
 

The Loss of Chemical Information

Many chemists working in industry research and development have accumulated a large amount of synthetic and structural characterization results. However, many of them have never been published. It is understandable that if the chemists have done a good job and are well-paid, both sides, the chemists themselves and the companies are satisfied. They do not need to publish anything.

Their interests in publishing their works are further discouraged by the conventional standard of chemical paper publications: they do not want to spend a lot of time painstakingly preparing the "introduction" and the "discussion" sections required by conventional chemistry journals. The preparation of these two sections are tricky. Many very good experimental works have been rejected because the authors failed to prepare good paragraphs for these sections. Even published "experimental work" can be published virtually without any experimental data presented if you are a good writer: It is not rare in some prestigious journals of chemistry to find papers without any experimental data except a statement such as "all the compounds give satisfactory elemental analysis (C,N,H), IR and NMR". Examples are not rare in Chemical Communication and Tetrahedron Letters¹⁰ .

For similar reasons, chemists in universities also have this problem and feel reluctant to publish fully their experimental findings, particularly if they are scattered unassembled experimental data of individual compounds.

Therefore, most (we estimate at least 2/3) of the experimental data for organic molecules was previously never published.

On the other hand, we know that chemistry is a typical experimental science. Chemical knowledge as written in the text books is based on experimental findings. The recording as fully as possible of all these experimental findings would on any account be very useful ¹¹ .

Can we do something better to change the situation of chemical information loss?
 

MolBank Section

Authors are not required to prepare "introduction" and "discussion" parts - it is not necessary to be asked to tell why you want to prepare these compounds.

MolBank papers are short notes of synthetic works and the data of the structural characterization which can be one molecule (one structure) per paper and can be as short as one page only. Such publications in Molecules will serve as the experimental data deposit.

Figure 1 shows a typical paper published in MolBank section.

This project might be interesting because a large volume of very precious chemical information, particularly the very diverse works of synthesis and structural characterization have either never been published -- the submitted papers were rejected by editors because they were too trivial (normally because it belonged to the classical scope of chemistry, i.e., pure synthetic or pure spectroscopic measurements), or the chemists themselves never planned to publish such works for individual compounds and isolated data because they thought them not publishable in a traditional journal. We believe that synthesis and structural elucidation of individual compounds are still the essence of chemistry and the material foundation of other research.

The ready publication of all scattered unassembled data for individual compounds in Molecules as short posters will provide a bank for chemists to deposit all of their information of synthesis and structural characterization, together with the sample availability information. Those works that have no compound samples available will also be published. When a large volume of (say 1 million) structures is published in this way and also constructed as a retrievable databank, it will be a very useful treasure to all chemists and other related scientists. If every synthetic chemist contributes 100 such posters, this number will be easily reached within several years.
 
 

New Development

• easy, electronic procedure to submit a paper.
• free access from the Internet with powerful searching tools.

A chemist started to serve as the MolBank section Editor of Molecules (http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/editors.htm#molbank) in August 1999.
 

Discussion

Thus, Molecules publishes in the section of MolBank (http://www.mdpi.org/molbank) very short notes of experimental data records for individual molecules. Any scattered, unassembled experimental data for individual compounds which is conventionally not publishable is particularly welcomed, to be published as one-paper one-page for one structure and given special page numbers (M1, M2, etc.). They have been published in HTML format, with at least a formula of the target molecule. MDL MOL file is also included for every MolBank short notes. All papers submitted for consideration and publication in this column of "MolBank" have been refereed and the accepted papers edited (English corrected and format unified). The related chemical samples are in most cases available and the availability information is also published.

So far all papers published in the MolBank section have been indexed and abstracted by several leading indexing and abstracting services, including Chemical Abstracts; CAPLUS; Science Citation Index Expanded; SciSearch, Research Alert; Chemistry Citation Index; Current Contents/Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences.

We would say that this is only an interesting experiment.

Acknowledgments

 This awork was originally presented at the Third International Electronic Conference on Synthetic Organic Chemistry (ECSOC-3), www.mdpi.org/ecsoc-3.htm, September 1-30, 1999, and the 218th ACS National Meeting August 22-26, 1999.
 

References