The Royal Society of Chemistry announced today that it has acquired ChemSpider, heralding a breakthrough investment for the organisation and for the Chemistry Community.

This acquisition reflects RSC's commitment to providing access to rich resources of chemistry data and information. This complements RSC's existing leading role in online chemistry, including award-winning semantic mark-up technology and the release of the InChI resolver, recently launched in partnership with ChemSpider.



Dr Richard Pike and Dr Antony Williams "What originally started as a hobby project to give back something to the chemistry community has become one of the primary internet resources for Chemistry. And this from home built computers in a basement, with no funding and a team of volunteers. With the resources, reputation and vision of the RSC to support ChemSpider our long term goal is to deliver the primary online platform where chemists will resource information and collaborate with a worldwide community of scientists."

ChemSpider is a free online service providing a structure centric community for chemists. Providing access to almost 21.5 million unique chemical entities sourced from over 200 different data sources and integration to a multitude of other online services, ChemSpider is the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information.

Alan McNaught, Coordinator of the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier project, supports RSC's commitment to expand this important online resource, 'I am immensely pleased that ChemSpider's ground-breaking initiative, developed on a wing and a prayer and much individual goodwill, is now supported by the most innovative of national Chemical Societies'.

Antony Williams PhD, the original host of ChemSpider, is excited by the new possibilities, "What originally started as a hobby project to give back something to the chemistry community has become one of the primary internet resources for Chemistry. And this from home built computers in a basement, with no funding and a team of volunteers. With the resources, reputation and vision of the RSC to support ChemSpider our long term goal is to deliver the primary online platform where chemists will resource information and collaborate with a worldwide community of scientists."

RSC has acquired ChemSpider to fulfil its strategic objective of disseminating knowledge to the chemical community and advancing the chemical sciences. In partnership, RSC and ChemSpider will provide innovative services on a reliable infrastructure to service the chemical community and bring new, exciting opportunities for publishing and cheminformatics that will radically improve the online research environment.

The ChemSpider development team will continue to be located in the USA and the ChemSpider website will be re-launched later in the year.