Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist currently working at the University of Cambridge. As well as his work in chemistry, Murray-Rust is also known for his support of open access and open data.

Education

He was educated at Bootham School, a

private school A private school or independent school is a school not administered or funded by the government, unlike a State school, public school. Private schools are schools that are not dependent upon national or local government to finance their fina ...

York York is a cathedral city in North Yorkshire, England, with Roman Britain, Roman origins, sited at the confluence of the rivers River Ouse, Yorkshire, Ouse and River Foss, Foss. It has many historic buildings and other structures, such as a Yor ...

, and at Balliol College, Oxford. After obtaining a

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

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 and was first warden of Andrew Stewart Hall of Residence. In 1982, he moved to Glaxo Group Research at Greenford to head Molecular Graphics, Computational Chemistry and later protein structure determination. He was Professor of Pharmacy in the University of Nottingham from 1996 to 2000, setting up the Virtual School of Molecular Sciences. He is now Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at Churchill College, Cambridge.

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 The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

. With Henry Rzepa, he has extended this to chemistry through the development of

markup language A markup language is a Encoding, text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate au ...

s, especially Chemical Markup Language. He campaigns for open data, particularly in science, and is on the advisory board of the Open Knowledge International and a co-author of the Panton Principles 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 model, open source, and open standards; it was initiated by Peter Murray-Rust and others in 2005. Multiple open source cheminformatics projects associate themselves w ...

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 (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 ...

. In 2014, he was awarded a Fellowship by the Shuttleworth Foundation 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

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, created by Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber and Donald Wilson (writer and producer), Donald Wilson, depicts the adventures of an extraterre ...

'', 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 in relation to the 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 (journal), Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, ...

, 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 People from Guildford Computational chemists