ChemSpider Blog

I am off to Bio-IT in Boston this coming week and I am honored to have been asked to talk on ChemSpider. I wasn’t on the agenda as of 72 hours ago but was offered an opportunity as a result of a cancellation in one of the sessions. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s new in the world of informatics this year and due to be unveiled at Bio-IT. At SBS there was only one person in the room when I talked who had even heard of ChemSpider. I didn’t take offense…about 60 people went away informed! I hope for a similar opportunity at Bio-IT. The blog will be fairly quiet this week. Catch-up time is next week.

AN fyi, I recently wrote an article entitled “Public Chemical Compound Databases” in Current Opinion in Drug Discovery & Development 2008 11(3). The abstract is:

“The internet has rapidly become the first port of call for all information searches. The increasing array of chemistry-related resources that are now available provides chemists with a direct path to the information that was previously accessed via library services and was limited by commercial and costly resources. The diversity of the information that can be accessed online is expanding at a dramatic rate, and the support for publicly available resources offers significant opportunities in terms of the benefits to science and society. While the data online do not generally meet the quality standards of manually curated sources, there are efforts underway to gather scientists together and ‘crowdsource’ an improvement in the quality of the available data. This review discusses the types of public compound databases that are available online and provides a series of examples. Focus is also given to the benefits and disruptions associated with the increased availability of such data and the integration of technologies to data mine this information.”

It’s not an Open Access article but it’s out there if anyone is interested or is subscribed. Enjoy.

Those of you frequenting the blog will know that we have a dedicated subset on ChemSpider for Molbank and that I have found the MDPI management and editorial team a pleasure to work with. I discussed my want to stay in relationship with them in a recent blogpost and, as stated in that posting, followed up with them to make them aware of an error in their article and the ongoing discussions in the blogosphere about their “openness”. In case the readers of the blog aren’t set up to catch the comments on the blogposts I am pointing to a comment made today by a member of MDPI.

“We are aware that our current MDPI copyright statement is not in line with the BBB definitions on open access. We are currently smoothly moving to a CC By Attribution License v3.0. Marine Drugs (http://www.mdpi.org/marinedrugs/) has already been published under that license since January 2008. IJMS (http://www.mdpi.org/ijms/) and other MDPI journals will start publishing under this license in the May respectively June 2008 issues. All previous content published by MDPI will be released under the CC By license within a couple of months on our new publication platform (now under testing). So this discussion about MDPI and open access will soon be part of history.”

My experience of working in the domain of creating a community for chemists is quite a simple one. If you want to know what a group is up to just ask them. Seems that MDPI has a clear path forward.

Those who frequent the ChemSpider blog will know that we have worked with JC Bradley and his team to support their Open Notebook Science work. We have added functionality for them and they have been frequent depositors of both structures and spectra. It seemed appropriate to give them their own dedicated website as we have done with many others of late. So, now, UsefulChem has a dedicated subset on ChemSpider.