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Continuing my previous post, much like the “foundation” meeting at the Spring 2005 ACS National Meeting, many of us met over food and drinks to talk about chemistry, informatics, project development, and other things.

Starting at last year’s American Chemical Society national meeting in spring 2005 in San Diego, CA, the Blue Obelisk movement of open chemistry was started.

I recently released a new software project that grew out of a personal need. I have thousands of chemistry files on my computer and no good way to sift through them. The web may have sites like Chmoogle and great databases of chemical data out there.

It is easier to use Google to find something from [...]

Software releases are in some ways like birthdays. When someone turns 40, it’s not like they woke up one day and were a year older than when they were 39. And certainly, they didn’t wake up on their birthday, suddenly becoming “in their 40s” rather than “in their 30s.” They’re really just a day older, [...]

I talked about the first informal meeting in March but things are becoming a little more organized this summer.

The Blue Obelisk Movement now has an official website, mailing list, and is moving towards sharing data and algorithms. After years of mostly proprietary code, balanced with scattered code sharing among groups, open source chemistry is becoming [...]

OK, I’ve been on a bit of an open-access/open source kick with posts recently. But I’m going to post one more and talk about something else next time.

I heard quite a few people at the ACS meeting expounding on the opinion that open source won’t work in the chemical field. The two most common arguments [...]