Nature Chemistry

The first issue of the journal Nature Chemistry has gone live. This issue, which is free to view online, is said to cover the breadth of chemistry, from inorganic microtubes to theoretical studies of how water behaves in detonations.

For this new title, Nature Publishing Group says that it has evolved its production processes. This includes redrawing compound structures submitted by authors to be machine-readable and converting these structures to International Chemical Identifiers (InChIs). InChIs are an alpha-numeric way of representing a chemical structure. They are unique to the compound they describe and can encode absolute stereochemistry. Because they are machine-readable, InChIs enable data-mining and detailed linking between articles, databases and other information sources.

Nature Chemistry articles are also annotated to identify all of the chemical compounds mentioned throughout the text. Users can choose to view the article with all of the compounds highlighted, and find out more about those compounds by linking out to other information resources including PubChem and ChemSpider.

In addition, pop-up images of chemical structures are associated with the bold compound numbers in the article text. Users can click on the bold compound number to view enhanced compound pages, created by the Nature Chemistry team. These compound pages provide Chemdraw files, 3-D structures, elemental analysis, links to external databases and other information.

'Our aim is to make the research article the hub of science once more,' said Jason Wilde, NPG’s publisher for the physical sciences.