With an intention to provide a free internet resource of chemistry related data for the community, ChemSpider provides an online database of chemical compounds, reaction syntheses and related data. Members of the community can contribute to the database via the deposition of chemical structures, synthesis procedures and analytical data. Data are also aggregated from many other depositors, at present over 400 data sources. The aggregation of data associated with over 25 million chemical...

This meeting was about "Making the Web Work for Science and the Impact of e-Science and the Cyberinfrastructure." I provided an overview of how access to information has changed over the past 20 years for me. I talked about the challenges for publishers serving the chemistry community and how their business models are being challenged and how I empathize with the struggle to figure out how to deal with it. I talked about quality and how care must be taken when using information online. We...