RSC acquires ChemSpider

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has acquired ChemSpider, a free online service providing a structure-centric community for chemists. RSC has already worked with ChemSpider recently to develop an InChI resolver.

ChemSpider provides access to almost 21.5 million unique chemical entities sourced from over 200 different data sources and integration to a multitude of other online services.

RSC says that it has acquired ChemSpider to help in its goal of disseminating knowledge to the chemical community and advancing the chemical sciences. In partnership, RSC and ChemSpider intend to provide innovative services on a reliable infrastructure to service the chemical community and bring new, exciting opportunities for publishing and cheminformatics that will radically improve the online research environment.

Antony Williams, the original host of ChemSpider, commented, ‘What originally started as a hobby project to give back something to the chemistry community has become one of the primary internet resources for chemistry. And this from home-built computers in a basement, with no funding and a team of volunteers. With the resources, reputation and vision of the RSC to support ChemSpider, our long term goal is to deliver the primary online platform where chemists will resource information and collaborate with a worldwide community of scientists.’

The ChemSpider development team will continue to be located in the USA and the ChemSpider website will be re-launched later in the year.