ChemSpider Blog

There have been a number of discussions on this blog about Open Data, Free Access and Open Access. There continues to be confusion and I for one, UNFORTUNATELY, still interchange Free Access and Open Access while speaking. For those of you interested in this domain I highly recommend reading the recent posting by Steven Harnad.

A list of links to articles on the ChemConnector Blog may be of interest to some:

The Full NMR Assignment of  Hexacylinol using CASE

Taking a Break from Wikipedia Curation

 My friend, An American Citizen

Does the Power of Marketing Equate to the Stupidity of the Public?

I am happy to announce that the LASSO project previously announced on this blog, is well underway. Last week I spent a day in Toronto visiting with SimBioSys regarding this project and other projects I am now consulting with them on. There are a whole series of exciting possibilities for mashing together some of their capabilities with ChemSpider. Think about Synthetic Accessibility and Retrosynthetic Analysis as future possibilities!

This weekend we have done a lot of work to prepare for the impending rollout of all of the search screens and a crowdsourcing project to help validate it’s performance, learn about the constraints under which it can be used and establish the most appropriate work flows to make the system easy to use. In setting up LASSO we have calculated millions of descriptors and have deposited them onto our database. We have now reached that interesting state of affairs called “hard drive envy”. We keeping seeing big disks in the adverts and wishing we had them.

With LASSO depositions comes a request to our users. We would like to buy some new hardware to support the ongoing depositions. If you find our service of any value and would care to offer some “hardware support” please click on “Support ChemSpider” on any record or right here. We’ll take early Valentine’s Day presents from those of you who love us. And we won’t be upset if you don’t. We’ll keep bringing chocolates for you everyday…