This blog post is an introduction to a series that we will be running that looks at how natural products research can be facilitated by new technologies, such as ChemSpider. Along the way we might also consider some of the challenges that come with generating and (re)using chemical data as we move into an age where more and more data is generated by all of us, and the end consumer of that data may not only be a human reading a publication on a screen (or in a print copy).
In our recently published editorial we mention our belief that the natural products community may benefit from both using and contributing to ChemSpider. Over the next few posts we hope to illustrate some aspects of ChemSpider that we hope may be of use.
We don’t know if you use ChemSpider every day, or have only visited the site once or twice; if you always find what you want or perhaps have sometimes have obtained unexpected results; or somewhere in-between. But we hope that we can show you how features of ChemSpider that make your life easier, be it by showing you: types of data that you didn’t know that you could find; or approaches to searching that you were not aware of. Most of all, we hope that we can show you the possibility of the resource that we as a community of researchers passionate about chemical structures can build.
Of course we don’t want this to be a one-way conversation, and we welcome comments to the blog posts and emails (please direct these to ChemSpider@rsc.org in the first instance).
