Peter Murray-Rust | |
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 at Wikimania 2014 | |
| Born | 1941 (age 83–84) Guildford, England |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Known for | |
| Awards | Herman Skolnik Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | A structural investigation of some compounds showing charge-transfer properties (1969) |
| Website | www-pmr |
Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist currently working at theUniversity of Cambridge. As well as his work in chemistry, Murray-Rust is also known for his support ofopen access andopen data.
He was educated atBootham School,[citation needed] aprivate school inYork, and atBalliol College, Oxford. After obtaining aDoctor of Philosophy with a thesis entitledA 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 toGlaxo Group Research at Greenford to head Molecular Graphics,[1] Computational Chemistry and later protein structure determination. He was Professor ofPharmacy in theUniversity of Nottingham from 1996 to 2000, setting up the Virtual School of Molecular Sciences. He is nowReaderEmeritus in Molecular Informatics at theUniversity of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus atChurchill College, Cambridge.
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 theSemantic Web. WithHenry Rzepa, he has extended this to chemistry through the development ofmarkup languages, especiallyChemical Markup Language.[2] He campaigns foropen data, particularly in science, and is on the advisory board of theOpen Knowledge International and a co-author of thePanton Principles for Open scientific data.[3] Together with a few other chemists, he was a founder member of theBlue Obelisk movement in 2005.[4][5][6]
In 2002, Peter Murray-Rust and his colleagues proposed an electronic repository for unpublished chemical data called theWorld Wide Molecular Matrix (WWMM). In January 2011, a symposium around his career and visions was organized, calledVisions of a Semantic Molecular Future.[7][8][9][10] In 2011, he and Henry Rzepa were joint recipients of theHerman Skolnik Award of theAmerican Chemical Society.[11] In 2014, he was awarded a Fellowship by theShuttleworth 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 theBlue 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.[12][13] This is a reference to the long-running British science fiction television seriesDoctor Who, in which the main character periodicallyregenerates into a different form, which is played by a different actor.
As of 2014, Murray-Rust was granted a Fellowship byShuttleworth Foundation in relation to the ContentMine project which uses machines to liberate 100,000,000 facts from the scientific literature.[14]
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 theBerlin Declaration on Open Access. In 2014, he actively raised awareness of glitches in the publishing system ofElsevier, where restrictions were imposed by Elsevier on the reuse of papers after the authors had paid Elsevier to make the paper freely available.[15]
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