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ChemSpider, the open-access online database of structure-searchable chemical information, has found a new home with the UK's Royal Society of Chemistry. The move is hoped to enable ChemSpider to expand in scope and become a primary resource for online chemistry data.The acquisition of ChemSpider builds on an existing partnership between the two organisations, which last year saw the launch of a web-based resolver for the IUPAC's International Chemical Identifier (InChI) and its more streamlined cousin, the InChIKey, which allow chemical structures to be associated with strings of text. Graphical representations of chemical structures, while a valuable means of communication between human chemists,...

A chemist running a computer server from his home is quietly solving one of his colleagues' biggest frustrations by providing the community with an open-access source of chemical information. Although biologists have enormous public databases of genes and proteins, chemists usually have to pay for access to data on molecules. Chemist Antony Williams is hoping to change this in a move likely to ruffle the feathers of the American Chemical Society. Williams, a private consultant based in Wake Forest, North Carolina, has started a website called ChemSpider that has compiled data on nearly 20 million molecules in a year. The...