Chemistry's Web Data Expands

A recent article published in nature's news column by Richard Van Noorden, 

mentioning that Chemistry's resources are slowly coming under openaccess.

Chemistry is the only science discipline ( i think) which have the major difficulties 

to access for free. Most of the chemistry databases requires subscription charges

in big amount and most of the Institutions in India are not afford to provide them.

Most often the database has been under the control of European based countries 

like American chemical Society, CAS, Pubchem, RSC,Wiley,Elseveir, scifinder, 

Reaxys, Thomson Reuters..etc, the subscription charges are in dollars or euros and

the major problem is also coming as copy right protection......Read more

Chemistry on Internet

Academic drug discovery will get another boost in September, when a consortium of eight pharmaceutical firms, three biotechnology companies and a number of leading informaticians releases its own free, online drug-discovery platform, the Open Pharmacological Concepts Triple Store (OpenPHACTS). Supported in part by a €10-million (US$13-million) grant from the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative, the website will link data on small molecules and their biological effects, to provide a library of compounds that anyone can download and explore.

Unlike biologists, who are swamped by free databases on genes and proteins, chemists have always expected to pay for their data. Until a few years ago, the market in chemical information was monopolized by the ACS Chemical Abstracts Service, a manually curated registry that now holds more than 65 million structures, charges individual users thousands of dollars a year for access and does not allow large downloads or repurposing of its information. Its SciFinder service offers tools to make sense of the data. Similar analytical services are sold by firms such as IBM, Thomson Reuters and Elsevier in Amsterdam, which offers the Reaxys tool (see ‘Chemistry breaks free’).

But in 2004, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) created PubChem, into which anyone can deposit data on structures and their biological activity. In 2005, the ACS sought to restrict PubChem’s reach to molecules characterized by NIH-funded researchers, but was unsuccessful. The database has now grown to more than 32 million structures and, according to PubChem, has roughly 100,000 unique users per day. In 2007, another free repository, ChemSpider, was created by chemist Antony Williams; in 2009, it was purchased by the UK Royal Society of Chemistry in London and it now holds 27 million structures.

These two databases are now the Internet’s main chemistry hubs, linking out to other sources of free online information, such as ChEMBL, a database of about 1 million bio­active drug-like small molecules hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK. The result is a web of interconnected free data, contrasting with high-quality but closed-off subscription databases.

Read the success story behind the development of Chemspider