Comments on: Supporting Synthetic Procedures from the Synaptic Leap

By: Chris Singleton

Chris Singleton — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 06:42:18 +0000

So, with your reference to Gladwells ‘Tipping Point’ , how shall we start an epidemic of ChemSpider? I’ve been telling colleagues constantly, it just seems to take quite aq bit of time for this to build up.

By: Reto Mueller

Reto Mueller — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:50:16 +0000

[citation]The German government is very supportive of chemistry[/quote]

Yes, but CLEARLY spoken: supporting “chemie.de” is just spending money for a commercial service. 1 Mio Euro made chemie.de big and this is now not helpful if a competitor wants to enter the market.

Another example: FIZ-Chemie was supported for the development of chemgapedia. Several millions of Euro. Now what happens? They just fill in Google Adsense into their pages and lower the income of all the web sites that HAVE NEVER BEEN SUPPORTED BY THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT. And in addition, they have enough money to translate all their content into French and English too.

So please, be careful! I have nothing against financial support of scientific activities, BUT CHEMIE.DE AND FIZ-CHEMIE are more or less commercial suppliers in a field, where we have enough competitors – even better services…

ACS against the public-supported NIH database. It is the same. Sorry. The principle is: governmental support of activities that compete with an already existing commercial supplier is NOT ALLOWED (even in the current EU law).

If someone wants to sue German Authorities, please give me a hint.

Best regards

Reto

By: Antony Williams

Antony Williams — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:47:28 +0000

Reto..I can tell you that ChemSpider “does not get tremendous financial support.” We have no grants supporting the work. We are fortunate enough to be able to source some funds from doing some customer web service development for some companies. We, of course do WAY more than just displaying text data and news that everyone else has. If the chemical industry sponsors would support us, as well as the Organic Chemistry Portal then a lot more could of course be brought to the community. Maybe there is an opportunity for us to collaborate…I think what Doug et al produce is excellent.

The German government is very supportive of chemistry…I’ve observed it directly and they are fortunate to get the support.

By: ChemSpiderMan

ChemSpiderMan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:46:47 +0000

Doug….sorry I missed part 2 of your question first time around. At present the game does not support a combination of data but it is very early days. We are working on building the spectral collection initially then can start assembling collections of data for elucidation purposes.

By: ChemSpiderMan

ChemSpiderMan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:35:53 +0000

THis input from Bob Lancashire, developer of JSpecView

“Maybe the JRE is not properly installed for Safari, since it would probably not automatically detect Safari on installation and the .DLL files would have to be manually copied to the correct folder????
It would recognise Firefox and so that works OK…

JSpecView does not point to anything, it is the Javascript on the web page that calls the applet and attempts to discover whether the user has a JRE installed, and if they do, is it at least 1.5+”

By: Reto Mueller

Reto Mueller — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:20:11 +0000

[citation]organized in a format that is free but profitable[/citation]

I can judge Doug Taber’s Organic Portal is not profitable and does not get tremendous financial support. They maybe do not have programming skills or do not rely on crowd sourcing… So they work hard to put all the content online.

Comparing with other chemistry sites, which just display Text Data received from Elsevier and publish news that everyone publishes (chemweb.com) the chemical community must recognize the differences and the efforts, but nothing happens.

Indeed, if the chemical industry sponsors the organic chemistry portal, they for sure can bring more content online. They for sure can program more tools even for own crowd sourcing experiments.

Why? We absolutely need more diversity! Currently, thousands of Wikipedia copies are spread over the internet. The organic chemistry portal is slightly different – not only textually based, but I am sure they could organize their data better if the industry books more advertisement.

Sorry. I am sure, there is enough money. But comparing with german-based chemie.de:
They received after funding 1 000 000 Euro support by the german goverment.
Now they have 20 co-workers just for marketing purposes…

And do they produce more/better content?

How can Doug and his coworker enter this market? It is NOT possible.

By: Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:09:15 +0000

I get something similar when using Safari – but when using Firefox it works just fine. In Safari you get directed to an odd Sun site that seems to be out of date and certainly isn’t very helpful. I am wondering whether JSpecView is pointing at an old version of Java or similar?

By: Antony Williams

Antony Williams — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:44:29 +0000

Doug…the game should be supported on Mac OSX

http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp

MAC OS is listed for the latest 6u12 of Java

By: Andrew Sun

Andrew Sun — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:15:35 +0000

there is always so much useful information that needs to be organized in a format that is free but profitable, navigational and easy to access.

By: Doug Taber

Doug Taber — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:27:41 +0000

1. Can the Spectral Game be played on a Mac? I tried, but it said I needed a Java plug-in. When I followed the link to the Java plug-in, it said that it was not available for a Mac.

2. Does the game have combined data sets, 1H, 13C, NMR, MS?

Thanks,

Doug