A brief history of Molecularpedias

A brief history of Molecularpedias

1. 

   Chemistry is mostly about molecules. Hence it is one of the molecular sciences
   • The process was started around 1881 by Friedrich Konrad Beilstein.
   • His handbook was the (molecular) Wikipedia of his day!
   • And it introduced many modern concepts, such as the information triple (Molecule|Property|Citation)
   • as well as the concept of assiduously citing your sources! No citation, no entry!!
2. As of today, there are 58,045,845 molecules known
   • For each of which between 10 - 50 well-defined properties (sometimes more) are recorded (or calculated).
   • Augmented with virtual molecules (which could, in principle exist if people wished them to)
3. You will see from the below, that collecting and curating information about molecules has historically been done by just a small number of (commercial) organisations:
   • CAS (closed)
   • REAXYS (closed)
   • CCDC (closed)
   • PubChem (Open!)
   • These organisations harvest data from the original sources (just like Wikipedia)
4. Academic promotion still (in part) depends on your citations in CAS (= gold-plated standard)
5. But, accessing citations from these sources is Expensive and only available to rich(er) organisations.