At present, there is an unbelievable amount of chemical information out there, but most of this is inaccessible from a general web search without paying money. I found my students using web searches as a principle method for finding information, but there is limited free information on the web. There are some very useful sites like organic-chemistry.org and webelements.com, but material on these sites still carries copyright restrictions. I like the fact that with Wikipedia (a) Information is very easy to find; (b) Everything is linked seamlessly into a vast array of information - so if you find out that Ryoji Noyori was born in Kobe, Japan, you can click on the link to learn about Kobe - that comprehensiveness is something the chemistry-only sites can never have. There are many useful external links and references too; and (c) Nearly all of the content is free of copyright, and anything that isn't is tagged as such.
PS: I first blogged Martin Walker's enthusiasm for putting serious chemical research on Wikipedia back in February.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/19/2006 02:19:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
