Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
review for those accessing commercial databases but, with only 400 syntheses
at present, it is far smaller than the commercial systems containing tens of
thousands of reactions and is not a threat to the commercial systems as of yet.
22.3
FUTURE OF ONLINE CHEMISTRY RESOURCES
The expansion in scope, capability, and importance of the Internet as a source
of scientifi c information, data, and contributions continues unabated. More
scientists (accustomed to the Internet open-source model) are demanding free
and open access to literature, patents, data, and algorithms. The open-source
[90] model for software now underpinning a growing digital culture continues
to fl ourish, and existing companies will need to reinvent themselves as partici-
pants within this changing industry or be relegated to lost leaders. Similarly,
existing businesses generating revenues from chemistry databases likely per-
ceive a risk from the increasing availability of free and open data online for
scientists and chem/bioinformaticians to mash up into their in-house solutions.
However, the primary advantage of commercial databases is that they have
been in most cases manually curated, addressing the tedious task of quality
data checking. The aggregation of data from multiple sources, both historical
and modern, from multiple countries and languages and from sources not
available electronically, offers greater coverage than what is available
via
an
Internet search. However, how long will this remain an issue and when will
the data available electronically, for free, offer a suffi cient return on invest-
ment to start to negatively impact the commercial chemical database suppli-
ers? Internet queries are increasingly favored by scientists and the chemistry
community is likely to reap increasing benefi ts from the growing number of
free-access services and content databases. Academics in particular are likely
to have an increased focus on the use of free access databases. This will be
further exaggerated in third world countries where free-access systems are the
primary resources for information since commercial offerings have signifi cant
price barriers.
Librarians are believed to be retiring their print collections in favor of
electronic repositories of chemical journals. Internet search engines are
increasingly likely to be the fi rst port of call for the majority of scientists for
three simple reasons—they are fast, they are free, and they are available any-
where as the user is not tied to a physical location for the library. In terms of
data quality issues, the Internet generation has already demonstrated a willing-
ness to curate and enhance the quality of content as modeled by both Wikipedia
and ChemSpider. With the improvements promised by the Semantic Web, if
there are data of interest to be found, the search engines will facilitate it.
As discussed in more detail in Chapter 28, soon smart phones will become
“genius phones” or tablets [91] and there will be an increasing number of
mobile computing applications which will only further increase accessibility
to information (See Chapter 28). Access to appropriate scientifi c databases via
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