ChemSpider seminar on March 24

RSC ChemSpider Seminar — Managing and Integrating Chemistry on the Internet to Build Community for Chemists

The LBNL Library is hosting a seminar for researchers interested in online collaboration, data storage and curation, data exchange, crowdsourcing, and open access.

This seminar will explore ChemSpider ? a free access service providing a structure centric community for chemists and the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information.

March 24, 2010 ? Wednesday
3:00 p.m. ? 4:30 p.m
Building 50 Auditorium
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Bring your laptop for a hands-on demo session.

**** For UC Berkeley personnel: Please contact Jeffery Loo (JLLoo@lbl.gov) by Monday, March 22, 12:00 p.m. for a visitor pass and shuttle bus directions. A visitor pass is required for entry into the Berkeley Lab by UC Berkeley guests.

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.

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.

SPEAKER

Antony Williams, PhD, is a leader in the domain of free access chemistry. 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.

ChemSpider began as a hobby project in a basement and went on to become one of the most popular Chemistry websites with the highest quality of data available online. Antony spent over a decade in the commercial scientific software business as Chief Science Officer for ACD/Labs, one of the domain leaders in scientific software. He is an accomplished NMR spectroscopist with over 100 peer-reviewed publications. During his career he was the NMR Technology Leader for the Eastman-Kodak company and has worked in both academia and national government research institutions.