2012 Herman Skolnik Award Winners Announced

 Drs. Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa are the joint recipients of the 2012
 Herman Skolnik Award presented by the ACS Division of Chemical Information
 (CINF). The award recognizes outstanding contributions to and achievements in
 the theory and practice of chemical information science and related disciplines.
 The prize consists of a $3,000 honorarium and a plaque. The winners will also be
 invited to present an award symposium at the Fall 2012 ACS National Meeting to
 be held in Philadelphia.
 Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa are recognized for their continued efforts to
 advance the field of chemical informatics, particularly in electronic and online
 forms, for opening standards to facilitate first-class science, and promoting
 new ways to collaborate and exchange chemical data. Through their efforts they
 have dramatically improved the ways in which molecular data are embedded in
 published scientific articles, preserving chemical identifiers and facilitating
 indexing and searching online. Their work has had a huge impact in the fields of
 chemical document analysis, chemistry on the Internet and in the orchestration
 of a viable strategy for making electronic chemistry information as widely
 accessible and usable as possible in our information age.
 Henry Rzepa and Peter Murray-Rust have been closely associated with chemistry on
 the Internet, and were the only two chemists at an early WWW conference held in
 CERN in 1994. From this they were involved in the use of XML and development of
 the Chemical Markup Language (CML). Other Internet-related projects lead by
 Henry include how a chemical journal might evolve to benefit from the Internet
 (the CLIC project, jointly with Cambridge, Leeds University and the RSC), an
 exploration of online chemical conferencing (the ECTOC series), the ChemWeb
 discussion forum, the Molecule-of-the-month columns, and co-organizing the first
 ever Internet-focused session at an ACS national meeting (in 1995) dedicated to
 the Internet and the Web, along with dedicated workshops in Washington DC, the
 UK and at Imperial College. In addition to his Internet-related activities,
 Peter has also overseen development of software including OSCAR1 for
 experimental data checking and its extension to OSCAR4 for chemical tagging and
 other chemical natural-language processing; OPSIN name to structure conversion
 (delivered as Open Source to the community); Chem4Word add-in; and CrystalEye
 online resource of crystal structure data from the Internet. Peter has also been
 very active in the principles and practice of Open Data, in chemistry and
 elsewhere, and he was one of the team that defined the Panton Principles
 (honored by the SPARC Innovator, 2010)