I spend a lot of my night time hours browsing the internet looking for new chemistry resources that may be of value to the community. During my travels across the web I continue to stumble across new resources that I have never heard of before. Some of these databases focus on minerals, on drugs (pharmaceuticals and street varieties), on polymers or organometallics, crystal structures or ligands and targets. The number and diversity of databases out there on the internet touching just chemistry is incredibly large. I judge there are many tens of databases potentially of interest to chemistry (hundreds if we include “SDF files” from chemical vendors). It would not be possible to support all of these resources in ChemSpiderwhich has, presently, a limitation of supporting small organic molecules that can be represented by an InChI. ChemSpider has assumed the role of being the central hub for linking chemistry on the internet but when chemistry database resources cannot be indexed into the system there is still a value to the community, I believe, to provide a central resource for chemists to source information. This could be expanded to include other types of Scientific Databases including Biology, Physics etc. Welcome SciDBs….a wiki for Scientific Databases.
The SciDBs Wiki
There are already three databases represented on the Wiki: Zinc, ChemSpider and DrugBank. We are hoping that the hosts of the databases, BOTH commercial and freely available, will add their own databases online. Else, with time, we will do it….
