Microsoft is partnering with several universities to create open-access Web sites where chemists, freely and easily, can find details about molecules and atoms. That’s the report today from Peter Murray-Rust of the chemistry department at the University of Cambridge, in his blog.
Murray-Rust notes that Microsoft has financed and developed a software design called Object Re-Use and Exchange “which sees the future as composed of a large number of interoperating repositories rather than monolithic databases.” Using it, he continues, will allow bench chemists and undergraduates to browse libraries of molecular structures to get information they need for research and publications, rather than being restricted to whatever database to which they happen to have a password.
“We shall also be ‘scraping’ (ugly word) any material we can legally access,” Murray-Rust writes.
Partners in the program, besides Cambridge and Microsoft, include Penn State University, Cornell, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the PubChem project, a free database of molecular structures hosted by the National Institutes of Health.—Josh Fischman
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