ChemSpider reactions – delivering a free community resource of chemical syntheses

Presentation delivered by Colin Batchelor from the RSC eScience team at ACS New Orleans Spring Meeting April 2013. There are dozens of public compound databases now available online, some of these providing access to tens of millions of chemical compounds. However, very little effort has been put into the delivery of databases of chemical reactions with the majority of large resources being commercial in nature. In our five years of delivering chemical based data resources to the chemistry community one of the primary requests has been that chemists want to know how to synthesize many of the chemicals they are researching. This presentation will provide an overview of our concerted efforts to enhance access to freely available chemistry data and will discuss the ChemSpider Reactions as an integrating hub of content including data extracted from US patents, from RSC Journals and databases and from our micro-publishing platform ChemSpider Synthetic Pages (CSSP).