Peter Murray-Rust (born 1941) is a chemist currently working at the
University of Cambridge
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
. As well as his work in chemistry, Murray-Rust is also known for his support of
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
and
open data
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.
The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...
.
Education
He was educated at
Bootham School
Bootham School is an independent Quaker boarding school, on Bootham in the city of York in England. It accepts boys and girls ages 3–19, and had an enrolment of 605 pupils in 2016. It is one of seven Quaker schools in England.
The schoo ...
and
Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. One of Oxford's oldest colleges, it was founded around 1263 by John I de Balliol, a landowner from Barnard Castle in County Durham, who provided the f ...
. After obtaining a
Doctor of Philosophy
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common Academic degree, degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields ...
with a thesis entitled
A structural investigation of some compounds showing charge-transfer properties'' he became lecturer in chemistry at the (new)
University of Stirling
The University of Stirling (, gd, Oilthigh Shruighlea (abbreviated as Stir or Shruiglea, in post-nominals) is a public university in Stirling, Scotland, founded by royal charter in 1967. It is located in the Central Belt of Scotland, built ...
and was first warden of Andrew Stewart Hall of Residence. In 1982, he moved to
Glaxo
GSK plc, formerly GlaxoSmithKline plc, is a British multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with global headquarters in London, England. Established in 2000 by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham. GSK is the tent ...
Group Research at Greenford to head Molecular Graphics, Computational Chemistry and later protein structure determination. He was Professor of
Pharmacy
Pharmacy is the science and practice of discovering, producing, preparing, dispensing, reviewing and monitoring medications, aiming to ensure the safe, effective, and affordable use of medicines. It is a miscellaneous science as it links heal ...
in the
University of Nottingham
The University of Nottingham is a public university, public research university in Nottingham, United Kingdom. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter in 1948. The University of Nottingham belongs t ...
from 1996–2000, setting up the Virtual School of Molecular Sciences. He is now
Reader
A reader is a person who reads. It may also refer to:
Computing and technology
* Adobe Reader (now Adobe Acrobat), a PDF reader
* Bible Reader for Palm, a discontinued PDA application
* A card reader, for extracting data from various forms of ...
Emeritus in Molecular Informatics at the
University of Cambridge
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus of
Churchill College, Cambridge
Churchill College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It has a primary focus on science, engineering and technology, but still retains a strong interest in the arts and humanities.
In 1958, a trust was establish ...
.
Research
His research interests have involved the automated analysis of data in scientific publications, creation of virtual communities, e.g. The Virtual School of Natural Sciences in the Globewide Network Academy, and the
Semantic Web. With
Henry Rzepa
Henry Stephen Rzepa (born 1950) is a chemist and Emeritus Professor of Computational chemistry at Imperial College London.
Education
Rzepa was born in London in 1950, was educated at Wandsworth Comprehensive School, and then entered the chemi ...
, he has extended this to chemistry through the development of
markup language
Markup language refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document ...
s, especially
Chemical Markup Language
Chemical Markup Language (ChemML or CML) is an approach to managing molecular information using tools such as XML and Java. It was the first domain specific implementation based strictly on XML, first based on a DTD and later on an XML Schema, t ...
. He campaigns for
open data
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.
The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...
, particularly in science, and is on the advisory board of the
Open Knowledge International
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England an ...
and a co-author of the
Panton Principles
The ''Panton Principles'' are a set of principles which were written to promote open science. They were first drafted in July 2009 at the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge.
History
The principles were written by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Ru ...
for Open scientific data. Together with a few other chemists, he was a founder member of the
Blue Obelisk
Blue Obelisk is an informal group of chemists who promote open data, open source, and open standards; it was initiated by Peter Murray-Rust and others in 2005. Multiple open source cheminformatics projects associate themselves with the Blue Obeli ...
movement in 2005.
In 2002, Peter Murray-Rust and his colleagues proposed an electronic repository for unpublished chemical data called the
World Wide Molecular Matrix
The World Wide Molecular Matrix (WWMM) was a proposed electronic repository for unpublished chemical data. First introduced in 2002 by Peter Murray-Rust and his colleagues in the chemistry department at the University of Cambridge in the United ...
(WWMM). In January 2011, a symposium around his career and visions was organized, called ''Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future''. In 2011, he and Henry Rzepa were joint recipients of the
Herman Skolnik Award of the
American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...
. In 2014, he was awarded a Fellowship by the
Shuttleworth Foundation
The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of ...
to develop the automated mining of science from the literature.
In 2009 Murray-Rust coined the term ''"Doctor Who" model'' for the phenomenon exhibited by the
Blue Obelisk
Blue Obelisk is an informal group of chemists who promote open data, open source, and open standards; it was initiated by Peter Murray-Rust and others in 2005. Multiple open source cheminformatics projects associate themselves with the Blue Obeli ...
project and other Open Science projects, where when a project leader does not have the resources to continue to lead a project (e.g. because he or she has moved to another university with other tasks), someone else will stand up to become the new leader and continue the project. This is a reference to the long-running British science fiction television series ''
Doctor Who
''Doctor Who'' is a British science fiction television series broadcast by the BBC since 1963. The series depicts the adventures of a Time Lord called the Doctor, an extraterrestrial being who appears to be human. The Doctor explores the u ...
'', in which the main character periodically
regenerates into a different form, which is played by a different actor.
As of 2014, Murray-Rust was granted a Fellowship by
Shuttleworth Foundation
The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of ...
in relation to th
ContentMine project which uses machines to liberate 100,000,000 facts from the scientific literature.
Activism
Murray-Rust is also known for his work on making scientific knowledge from literature freely available, and in such taking a stance against publishers that are not fully compliant with the
Berlin Declaration on Open Access. In 2014, he actively raised awareness of glitches in the publishing system of
Elsevier
Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...
, where restrictions were imposed by Elsevier on the reuse of papers after the authors had paid Elsevier to make the paper freely available.
[Paul Jump, Elsevier: bumps on road to open access, Times Higher Education, 2014, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/elsevier-bumps-on-road-to-open-access/2012238.article]
References
External links
Cambridge university page*
* Doctoral thesis
"A structural investigation of some compounds showing charge-transfer properties"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Murray-Rust, Peter
Living people
1941 births
British chemists
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Academics of the University of Stirling
Academics of the University of Nottingham
People educated at Bootham School
Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge
Members of the University of Cambridge Department of Chemistry
Open science
Open content activists
Open access activists
Computational chemists