Peter Murray-Rust (born 1941) is a chemist currently working at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

. As well as his work in chemistry, Murray-Rust is also known for his support of open access 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)" movement ...

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. After obtaining a

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

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 in the

University of Nottingham , mottoeng = A city is built on wisdom , established = 1798 – teacher training college1881 – University College Nottingham1948 – university status , type = Public , chancellor ...

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

and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus of 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. With Henry Rzepa, he has extended this to chemistry through the development of markup languages, 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

, 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 for Open scientific data. Together with a few other chemists, he was a founder member of the Blue Obelisk 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 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 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'', 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

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'', ...

, 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