ChemSpider Blog

During the past couple of months I have watched new players enter the world of Networking for Scientists. One of the newcomers is ResearchGate and it already appears to be attracting lots of interest and people are signing up daily. ChemSpider has a declared mission of “Building a Structure Centric Community for Chemists” and as part of our direction we were considering building a modern environment for networking. As we have continued our task our implementing the necessary environment for structure support we have watched other parties step into the role of networking scientists. Rather than challenge these other efforts our preference is again to develop community and collaborate with these groups for the benefit of all. ResearchGate advertises itself as:

“ResearchGATE is a new free of charge Science 2.0 platform designed for the need of researchers. With this new platform we want to change the world of science by providing a global and powerful scientific web-based environment, in which scientists can interact, exchange knowledge and collaborate with researchers of different fields. Sign up and be part of the first scientific network.

* present yourself and your research projects
* enroll, expand, and broaden your science network globally
* exchange know-how and expertise
* initiate collaboration
* discuss your research limitation and get positive feedback
* use our innovative tools and work environments for online collaboration”

and is well on its way to deliver in these areas. ResearchGate and ChemSpider have formed a collaboration to integrate our efforts and you will see structure-handling and representation as an outcome from our efforts in the foreseeable future. For now we have set up a ChemSpider Discussion Group on ResearchGate and welcome you to sign up.

We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship moving forward. Watch this space…

Martin Walker and I talk a lot. He is an evangelist for Wikipedia Chemistry, Open Chemistry and community building for chemists and we are proud to have him as a member of  the ChemSpider Advisory Group. Martin recently gave a talk entited “Chemistry on the Internet: A Revolution in Chemical Information”. He provides an overview of what was Web 1.0 Chemistry, what Web 2.0 chemistry means the the community and how Wikipedia is contributing to Chemistry. It’s a great overview of what’s going on online in regards to Chemistry and even has a mention about ChemSpider’s contribution. If you are interested you can find the talk here as a PDF file.

I blogeed previously about the confusion of Talc and DMSO under the name of sclerasol here and pointed to the fact that PubChem was a mixture of both DMSO and Talc. What I like about our community is how fast attention is paid to issues like this. The record on PubChem has already been cleaned up and the confusion resolved. All links back to DMSO and MeSH have been resolved and the collective quality for the community is improved. The outcome of eyeballs carefully curating records like this is to the benefit of all…robots cannot do this…they are fast but mostly dumb to such detail I’m afraid. They can check that molecular formula and molecular weights associated with a structure are appropriate (actually they should be derived FROM the structure/compound!) We keep saying it and WIkipedians around the world would agree, a platform for public curation and annotation is necessary at a time when the amount of data available to the community continues to grow at an astonishing rate.