The American Chemical Society (ACS)’s Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), an authoritative subscription database which holds information on over 40 million molecules, is not known for its commitment to free chemical information on the internet. Their attitude: if you want reliable data on molecules, you should pay for it.
That view appears to be ever-so-slightly softening. Last week, CAS press-released that, in collaboration with Wikipedia, it had launched a free web-based resource, “common chemistry”, holding information on around 7800 chemical substances for the general public. The service has actually been available since the ACS spring meeting (March 22-26) in Salt Lake City.
“This collaboration is CAS’ gesture to provide accurate chemical information and ”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_registry_number “>CAS Registry Numbers to the public,” Christine McCue, CAS vice president for marketing, ”https://pubs.acs.org/cen/">tells Chemical & Engineering News, the ACS-published magazine.
The version (cut down from CAS’s subscription offering) consists of a list of synonyms for a chemical, its structure and formula, and also, most usefully, the aforementioned CAS registry number (a unique number assigned to a molecule by CAS as it is indexed, which has become a standard identifier in the chemical literature).
Most non-chemists will still go directly to Wikipedia (or Google) for their chemical information, where they will see much more information than Common Chemistry provides. But the collaboration at least means that Wikipedia pages can link to extremely reliable data sources. To understand the difficulties of finding reliable chemical data on the internet, look no further than snazzy newly-launched semantic database Wolfram Alpha, whose problems in this area have been gleefully documented by the blogosphere.
For chemists desiring an open-access store of information, the most exciting recent news is the acquisition of ChemSpider by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry, announced on 11 May. ChemSpider, launched just two years ago, is both a database and a service that aggregates chemical information on the web, and allows it to be searched by chemical structure, not just by name. And it’s free. “What I’m doing is highly disruptive,” ChemSpider founder Antony Williams told Nature News last year. Now he has the backing and resources of an established learned society, ChemSpider’s progress is worth watching. The Sceptical Chymist has more.