Submitting a ChemSpider SyntheticPages procedure
If you would like to submit a protocol to ChemSpider SyntheticPages you will need to create a ChemSpider account (or log in if you have one already).
A tutorial video outlining the submission and review process can be viewed below:
There are 4 steps to getting your protocol published:
- Create your page
- Inspect your submission
- Submit to Advisory board
- Revise
See and share your published synthetic procedure.
1. Create your page
Selecting Submit a Page from the Submissions menu will open a new submission form (if you have experimental section from a publication or thesis as a starting point you can complete this page in less than 10 minutes by cutting and pasting into the form). There are several sections to the submission form.
Author details
This should be automatically filled with your name and email address – if you wish to delay the publication of your procedure (for example, if your paper is not yet published you can set an embargo date). You can also select your group from the drop-down list.
The procedure and supporting data
Throughout the form there are lots of question mark symbols that will give you a prompt, telling you how to fill in each field. All of the fields are self explanatory, however there are a few key points:
- The Procedure or Transformation field should be a descriptive title
- The Compound being made field should only contain the name of the compound being made
- The Author’s Comment field is one of the most important fields in the article please include as much information (tips, tricks, observations or safety comments) as possible.
- The Multimedia section can hold lots of different types of information (pictures, videos, interactive spectra) if you have content that you want to add and don’t know how to include it please do email (chemspider-at-rsc.org)
- Importantly, don’t forget to add a Lead Reference (and if relevant Other References), these might be the citation for an old article that was the basis for your submission and you have optimised, or it may be your latest publication which you want to support and promote.
- The Data field is the place where you should supply relevant characterisation data. eg. NMR, IR, Mass spectra, Elemental analysis, etc.
If you cut/copy content from a word-processing package all of your formatting and special characters should be retained when you paste into the form, if you need to apply further formatting you can use the text editing tools which float next to the field that you are editing.
Remember: It is okay to use abbreviated chemical names as the ChemSpider mark-up will allow users to see the correct chemical structure – and open the appropriate ChemSpider record.
Scheme
When submitting a scheme you are asked to supply two forms: a chemical drawing file and an image file (if you use ChemDraw we provide a template that provides the preferred CSSP format settings)
Keywords
The Keywords section is key to the discoverability of your procedure; make sure that you select all appropriate terms in this section – if there are other relevant keywords that are relevant to your procedure you can enter these additional terms in a comma separated list in the Other Keywords field.
When you have filled in the form it will appear similar to the image below you can now Save your entry (after saving you will still be able to add or modify your procedure)
2. Inspect your record
After saving your procedure you will see a page that explains in more detail about how to the submission process works. After reading this page you can click through to a page which allows you to view your record as it will appear once published.
If you need to edit your submission you can click on the Edit button above your procedure which will display the submission form again so that you can make the required changes. When you’ve finished editing the submission and return to this page you can save this revision using the Save button (below) and when you are happy that your article is complete Click on the Submit button this will notify our Advisory board that your article is ready for review and give them the ability to view and comment on your article.
3. Submit to Advisory board
Your procedure will be inspected by a member of the Editorial board, who may leave comments (either inserted within the protocol itself or as a comment below the record; these messages will not be visible to others once the article is published) you will be notified of the response when an advisory board member leaves a comment) or approves your record.
4. Revise
If the editor has asked for revisions to the article you can use the Edit button to get back to the article editing view and make the requested changes.
Once finished you can Submit your article to the Editor again.
Don’t forget….
To tell everyone once your page is published. Email your friends and co-workers, tweet about your page, add it to your research group web pages, LinkedIn and other social network profiles and CV. And of course remember that you can cite it using the DOI in your next publication, or thesis.