ChemSpider Blog

We hope you’ve had an opportunity to take a look at the revamped website. If you would like to share your thoughts on usability and design or site performance please take a moment to click on the “Give Feedback” button on the website. This will really help us to make the ChemSpider user experience even better.

Some of the team were present at the ALPSP Conference last Thursday – as the envelope was opened to announce ChemSpider as the winner of the ALPSP Publishing Innovation award for 2010! The judging panel commented that “[ChemSpider] has quickly become a highly valued and comprehensive community resource and has immense potential for future development”.

We’re especially proud as we were up against the other excellent shortlisted finalists of DataSalon’s Mastervision (which was highly commended, and we use it ourselves), the Semantic Biochemical Journal from Portland Press and the University of Manchester, and the AIP’s UniPHY social networking site.

We also managed to recreate the prize giving with Antony & Valery this morning – difficult to recreate the atmosphere of a conference dinner at 9am on an autumn Monday morning though…

Pics after the jump

(more…)

My presentation today at the Wolfram Data Summit in Washington DC gave me a chance to rant about the quality of data online and ask the question who really cares? Many of the database hosts don’t appear to care (most don’t respond to emails when I find errors, very few give anyway to annotate an error for example). The talk seemed to be well received and shocked a few people.

For all you Tweeters out there following Science Online the Twitter account for Aileen and Dave at the RSC  is  ChemSpider.

Not to be confused with that of Antony Williams who is still vey much ChemSpiderman.

Nature, Mendeley, and the British Library are excited to present Science Online London 2010. How is the web changing the way we conduct, communicate, share, and evaluate research? How can we employ these trends for the greater good? This September, a brilliant group of scientists, bloggers, web entrepreneurs, and publishers will be meeting for two days to address these very questions.

ChemSpider will be there to hear and record what is being said. If you are going to be there look out for David Sharpe and Aileen Day.

We will of course report back on topics that pertain to ChemSpider and the greater world of chemistry publishing.