METHODS: Initiated, organized, and promoted the seminar.
SPEAKER: Dr. Antony Williams. He is the Vice President of Strategic Development at the Royal Society of Chemistry and is the host of ChemSpider, a free online structure centric community for chemists.
AUDIENCE: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley personnel, and researchers interested in online collaboration, data storage and curation, data exchange, crowdsourcing, and open access.
FORMAT: 90 minute presentation
DATE AND VENUE: March 24, 2010 – Building 50 Auditorium, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
ABSTRACT: The increasing availability of free and open access resources for scientists on the internet presents us with a revolution in data availability. The Royal Society of Chemistry hosts ChemSpider, a free access website for chemists built with the intention of building community for chemists (http://www.chemspider.com/).
ChemSpider is an aggregator of chemistry related information, at present over 20 million unique chemical entities linked out to over 300 separate data sources, ChemSpider has taken on the task of both robotically and manually curating publicly available data sources. It is also a public deposition platform where chemists can deposit their own data including novel structures, analytical data, synthesis procedures and host data associated with the growing activities associated with Open Notebook Science.
This presentation will examine chemistry on the internet, the dubious quality of what is available and how the ChemSpider crowdsourced curation platform is fast becoming one of the centralized hubs for resourcing information about chemical entities.
We will also review our efforts to provide free resources for synthesis procedures, spectral data and structure-based searching of the chemistry literature and how chemists can contribute directly to each of these projects.
Following the presentation and a question and answer session, a hands on session showing how to search for, curate and deposit data on ChemSpider will be given for interested parties.
