ChemSpider is a free access service providing a structure centric community for chemists. Providing access to millions of chemical structures and integration to a multitude of other online services, ChemSpider is the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information.

What is ChemSpider?

ChemSpider is a chemistry search engine. It has been built with the intention of aggregating and indexing chemical structures and their associated information into a single searchable repository and make it available to everybody, at no charge.

ChemSpider is a value-added offering of publicly available chemical structures since many additional properties have been added to each of the chemical structures. We intend ChemSpider to offer the fastest chemical structure searches available online and delivered with the flexibility and usability necessary to encourage repeat usage. A quick browse of the Getting Started Guide will help understand how ChemSpider can be of value.

What problems will ChemSpider solve?

There are tens if not hundreds of chemical structure databases and no single way to search across them. There are databases of curated literature data, chemical vendor catalogs, molecular properties, environmental data, toxicity data, analytical data and on and on.

The only way to know whether a specific piece of information is available for a chemical structure is to have simultaneous access to all of these databases. Since many of these databases are for profit there is no way to easily determine the availability of information within these commercial or even in the open access databases. With ChemSpider the intention is to aggregate into a single database all chemical structures available within open access and commercial databases and to provide the necessary pointers from the ChemSpider search engine to the information of interest. This service will allow users to either access the data immediately via open access links or have the information necessary to continue their searches into commercially available systems. The question “is there specific information about my chemical” will be answered. Accessing the information may require a commercial transaction with the appropriate provider.

ChemSpider released in March of 2007 with a number of publicly available databases as well as data provided by our collaborators. Information about data sources will be kept updated at our data sources page. At present the database contains information from such diverse sources as a marine natural products database, from all commercially available ACD/Labs databases, from the EPA’s DSSTox efforts and from a series of chemical vendors. The data collections will continue to expand. If you have an interest in uploading a data collection for viewing at ChemSpider please deposit your collection online or contact us at info-at-chemspider-dot-com.