In an effort to make the internet's mass of chemical data easier to search through, the RSC [Royal Society of Chemistry] and US-based company ChemZoo are developing tools to help chemists label their own compounds with a standard computer-readable tag.
The collaborative project, announced in December 2008, aims to help researchers share information on chemical structures and data for free online, and may impact on closed subscription databases such as those offered by the American Chemical Society (ACS)....
In the hope of provoking more enthusiasm for the [new, international, open InChI] format, the RSC and ChemZoo are working to provide a free 'resolver' to turn any InChI into a shorter 25-letter code (the 'InChI key'), also developed by Iupac and NIST, which is friendlier to search engines....
There is disagreement over what impact the collaboration could have on current gold standards in managing chemical information, such as the ACS's subscription-only chemical abstracts service (CAS) which allots compounds a CAS number and catalogues them using its own proprietary informatics platform....But the [CAS] information is not openly accessible - indeed, it is a major revenue generator for ACS, reportedly producing some $250 million in 2007.
[Antony Williams of ChemSpider] thinks that InChIs could eventually disrupt CAS by allowing public online searching of compounds by structure or substructure (rather than by typing in chemical names) - something that only the CAS registry and other proprietary services such as Elsevier's Beilstein database offer at the moment....
'It's not intended to replace in any way the high-quality curated service that CAS offers,' says [Richard Kidd, informatics manager at RSCS]. 'But the lack of an open chemical identifier and service to use it is a real barrier to the development of shared chemical resources across the Web'....
PS: See our past posts (1, 2) on the use of proprietary CAS Registry numbers for OA chemical research.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/08/2009 04:16:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
