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ChemSpider Becomes a Connector to Chemical Companies
Posted by: Antony Williams in ChemSpider Services, Community BuildingCopyright©2008 Antony Williams
ChemSpider hosts the “electronic catalogs” of many chemical vendors as a public service. When people use us to find chemical suppliers we do not expect to be compensated for the service and do not expect to be acknowledged for the service. If ChemSpider users get connected to companies and buy their chemicals so much the better. What has happened over the past few weeks has been very interesting though…we’ve seen a DRAMATIC increase in the number of requests to help source chemicals for people that are NOT on the ChemSpider database (yet) as well as to assist in identifying organizations (or individuals) who are interested in obtaining custom synthesis support. We’re happy to do it.
I’m also in the middle of assisting in the curation of Wikipedia and showing “willingness” there too. There are a whole hosts of other projects we are being invited to participate in also and we are showing “willingness”. There is an unfortunate downside to “willingness” though. There is very little time left to do “real work”. There is an increasing number of email requests and phone requests coming to us regarding “Where can I buy this chemical?” or “Can you help identify someone who can synthesize this chemical?”. In the past month we’re averaged about 20 requests per week but it is increasing fairly quickly. We have about an 80% success rate in finding the chemical of interest on the database or through or depositors as well as introducing the interested party to one or more people interested in doing custom synthesis for them…and then getting out of the way.
With this in mind you are going to see us expend some efforts to facilitate interactions between chemical vendors and interested parties. I consider this as a form of social networking for chemists - facilitating introductions and connections - okay, maybe more of a dating service.
Maybe it’s eChemistry (the science of attraction…an online dating service)? By the way, there is also the Microsoft eChemistry project and I hope that people don’t confuse the two….
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