ChemSpider Blog

I have blogged previously about our integration to IUCr. I am happy to announce that we have been busily curating their data and are presently active in indexing thousands of chemical structures and articles. We will definitely have problems in accurately representing organometallics with our present structure rendering and handling and due to the limitations of InChI. For the time being we are focused on organic molecules. As we index the molecules we are adding the Author and Title, linked via the DOI to the original article on the IUCr website, to the record. So, you will see something like this in the Supplementary Data section.

Expanding the index will grow the connectivities to IUCr structure by structure. We presently have >1300 structures on the dedicated website, iucr.chemspider.com. Enjoy.

Since day one ChemSpider has been focused on developing a social network via our intention to build a structure centric community for chemists. While I am a member of a number of social communities I felt it appropriate to approach someone who has both a passion and masterful knowledge of this domain. I had the pleasure of meeting Gerry Mckiernan at the ACS-New Orleans meeting early one morning pre-show. We chatted for an hour about our mutual passion for building community and Gerry graciously accepted my invitation to join our advisory group. Gerry’s details are below.

Gerry Mckiernan currently has primary responsibilities for Collection Development, Instruction, and Reference and Research Services in Chemical and Biological Engineering; Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering; Environment Sciences; Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering; and Mechanical Engineering, at Iowa State University (ISU), Ames. He has been employed by the ISU Library since April 1987. He has served as the Museum Librarian at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh (1983-1987), and as an Assistant Librarian with the Library of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, New York City (1978-1983), his hometown. His research interests have included alternative peer review practices and philosophies, emerging information technologies, and scholar-based innovations in publishing. His current research interests relate to Web 2.0 - the Participatory Web, most notably blogs, online social networks, wikis, and communities of participation.

Some of you may be aware of the Molbank Open Access Journal. I recently blogged about our dedicated website for this Open Access Journal described here. Murray-Rust has discussed MDPI journals previously and their nature of Open Access. I am happy to validate that they are as Open Access as they can be. They have given us the right to mirror their articles on our site and in the next few weeks we will do exactly that, host Molbank articles connected directly to the chemical structures. Watch this space for our exapanding integrations with Open Access publishers.