COLLABORATIONS IN CHEMISTRY - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 94

already having been deposited in a single day; analytical data and activity data
can also be deposited against existing chemical compounds.
As ChemSpider has grown in popularity and scope, numerous websites
have started to link to the databases. Wikipedia commonly includes links from
its chemical compound articles to ChemSpider, ZINC has included links in
its databases, Nature Publishing Group links from its chemical compound
pages from both its Nature Chemistry and Nature Chemical Biology journals,
as does the Royal Society of Chemistry for its prospected articles (http://
www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/projectprospect/faq.asp). ChemSpider also
provides access to a series of web services to allow querying of the data. For
example, four of the primary analytical instrumentation vendors (Bruker,
Waters, Thermo, and Agilent) have established or are presently pursuing inte-
gration of the ChemSpider data into their mass spectrometry data processing
software packages. The Web services are also used by other public and private
databases in either academia or industry. For example, Collaborative Drug
Discovery (CDD, www.collaborativedrug.com, also described in Chapter 21),
provides links to ChemSpider for molecules in their CDD database [25]. CDD
itself is a highly secure, commercial collaborative drug discovery informatics
platform with both a Vault for proprietary data, technologies to enable selec-
tive sharing, and over 50 publically accessible data sets available upon
registration.
Recently pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis
have shared some sets of active compounds for malaria and made them avail-
able in CDD, ChEBI, and PubChem. This deposition of large numbers of
compounds raises some issues relating to how the data will be used and acces-
sibility of the compounds for follow-up evaluation [26].

5.5 BLOGS

The tools described thus far facilitate collaborations in which the partners
work in a shared space online or pull information from a community online.
Another mode of collaboration involves working asynchronously and then
sharing the product of your work. Blogs and other types of social software
tools like image-sharing sites and presentation-sharing sites support this type
of collaboration. Blogs are defi ned by their format because the content varies
greatly. They are typically lists of individual posts, each with a permanent link,
a place for comments, can be tagged with a topic, and are posted in reverse
chronological order. Collaboration software which many companies already
have, such as Microsoft SharePoint Server (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/
en - us/Pages/default.aspx ) or Atlassian Confl uence (http://www.atlassian.com/
software/confl uence/), support blogging to some extent, but specialized blog-
ging software products such as MovableType (http://movabletype.com/) and
Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/) have more features and are more common
on the Web.