Avogadro Paper Published Open Access

In January of last year I was invited to attend the Semantic Physical Science Workshop in Cambridge, England. That was a great meeting where I met like-minded scientists and developers working on adding semantic structure to data in the physical sciences. Peter managed to bring together a varied group with many backgrounds, and so the discussions were especially useful. I was there to think about how our work with Avogadro, and the wider Open Chemistry project might benefit from and contribute to this area.

My thanks go out to Peter Murray-Rust for inviting me to the Semantic Physical Science meeting and helping us to get the Avogadro paper published in the Journal of Cheminformatics as part of the Semantic Physical Science collection. Noel O'Boyle wrote up a blog post summarizing the Avogadro paper accesses in the first month (shown below - thanks Noel) compared to the Blue Obelisk paper and the Open Babel paper. We only just got the final version of the PDF/HTML published in early January, but already have 12 citations according to Google scholar, showing as the second most viewed article in the last 30 days, and the most viewed article in the last year. The paper made the Chemistry Central most accessed articles list in October and November.

I made a guest blog post talking about open access and the Avogadro paper, which was later republished for a different audience. I would like to thank Geoffrey Hutchison, Donald Curtis, David Lonie, Tim Vandermeersch and Eva Zurek for the work they put into the article, along with our contributors, collaborators and the users of Avogadro. If you use Avogadro in your work please cite our paper, and get in touch to let us know what you are doing with it. As we develop the next generation of Avogadro we would appreciate your input, feedback and suggestions on how we can make it more useful to the wider community.