eScience at the Royal Society of Chemistry: Current Initiatives

Access to scientific information has changed in a manner that was likely never even imagined by the early pioneers of the internet. The quantities of data, the array of tools available to search and analyze, the devices and the shift in community participation continues to expand while the pace of change does not appear to be slowing. ChemSpider is one of the chemistry community’s primary online public compound databases. Containing tens of millions of chemical compounds and its associated data ChemSpider serves data tens of thousands of chemists every day and it serves as the foundation for many important international projects to integrate chemistry and biology data, facilitate drug discovery efforts and help to identify new chemicals from under the ocean. This presentation will provide an overview of the expanding reach of this eScience cheminformatics platform and the nature of the solutions that it helps to enable including structure validation, text mining and semantic markup, the National Chemical Database Service for the United Kingdom and the development of a chemistry data repository. We will also discuss the possibilities it offers in the domain of crowdsourcing and open data sharing. The future of scientific information and communication will be underpinned by these efforts, influenced by increasing participation from the scientific community and facilitated collaboration and ultimately accelerate scientific progress.