What is it about?
We (taxpayers!) fund hundreds of PhD students a year to carry out research in universities. When the students finish their research projects, they write a thesis. In chemistry, these theses may be available as hard copy or even in pdf format, but all the hard-won chemical data is hard to discover using electronic search - even if you know exactly what you are looking for. We sampled a tiny fraction of chemistry theses, to see how bad the problem was....
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Why is it important?
When we looked in detail at the 750 theses, we found that between them, they described the synthesis of around 45,000 distinct chemical entities. We checked to see how many of them were electronically discoverable by existing search methods, it turns out that only around half were easily found by electronic search. We also asked ten companies to tell us how useful they were. Very!
Perspectives
Take a look and decide for yourselves whether you think this is an interesting curiosity, or a vision of a future where ALL publicly funded research data is eventually made available to a public who have paid for it. At the heart of this this question is the "can we? / should we?" dichotomy. We have answered the first question - yes we can. The most fascinating question to me is "should we?". It will be up to scientists, funders (the Research Councils) and even governments and the public to provide an answer.
Dr David M Andrews
AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical Co Ltd
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The creation and characterisation of a National Compound Collection: the Royal Society of Chemistry pilot, Chemical Science, January 2016, Royal Society of Chemistry,
DOI: 10.1039/c6sc00264a.
You can read the full text:
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