ChemSpider: how a free community resource of data can support the teaching of NMR spectroscopy

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) hosts a number of resources of direct benefit to teaching chemistry. One of these resources, ChemSpider, is a free chemical database containing data for millions of chemical compounds. The data includes thousands of spectra, primarily contributed by members of the scientific community as ChemSpider depends on crowdsourcing for certain types of data. The NMR spectral data hosted on ChemSpider are integrated to various other RSC systems including an educational wiki and a micropublishing platform for reaction syntheses. The data are also available programmatically to the community and have been used as the basis of a game to teach NMR spectroscopy.