Just got wind, by way of old friend Michael Engel, of a rather intriguing forum for chemists called chemunpub.
The Chemistry Unpublished Papers forum, looks like a great place to find out what’s going on underneath the public face of research chemistry, with posters asking what they should do with their ‘green’ ionic liquids once they’ve finished with them and info about papers that shouldn’t have been published at all!
This from the forum FAQ itself:
Section: Unpublished results – Post procedures, experiments etc that any experienced chemist can think will work, judging on experience, similarity among substrates, known reactions, literature, etc. but they actually work only partially or don’t work at all.
Section: X-Files – Unexpected reactions: post here weird and bizzare chemistry behaviour…
Section: Fake Chemistry – in ten years of research, sometimes we encountered papers claiming wonderful yields and easy procedures that turned out to be absolutely irreproducible. In those case, our conclusion is that latitude is a key reaction parameter…
Section: General Chemistry Discussion – anything chemistry related that you (or moderators) think is not appropriate for the other sections, requests, suggestions, meeting announcements, research proposals, trends in chemistry etc.
I think anyone with an interest in the dark side of chemical research should keep a close eye on this forum over the coming months.
This item was originally published on Tuesday, but I’ve brought it back to the front to highlight interesting comments I received today from both Engel and the ChemUnPub webmaster