Some news: I will be speaking at the American Chemical Society’s 239th National Meeting & Exposition, March 21-25 2010 in San Francisco, California.

Specifically, I will be speaking as part of the Future of Scholarly Communication symposium, which is hosted by the Chemical Information Division (CINF) of ACS.

As you can guess, the symposium is one of many such efforts at coming to grips with the potential of Web technologies to ameliorate how researchers use the literature, whether in terms of access, comprehension, search specificity or machine usage. So far, I have to say we’re still very much in the “coming to grips” part of the problem, which I guess is to be expected, given the recentness and vastness of the possibilities offered by Web technologies.

This division consists of librarians, publishers, software and database vendors, and scientists in the fields of chemical information, chemical informatics, and drug discovery.

My preliminary title is “Putting the Researcher Forward: Expertise Databases For Better Navigation of the Literature”, and will likely focus on use cases whereby a database of semantically robust metrics can be facilitate the relationship of scientists with the literature. I’ll probably try to address cross-disciplinary issues as well, although that’s a tough one.