This meeting was about "Making the Web Work for Science and the Impact of e-Science and the Cyberinfrastructure." I provided an overview of how access to information has changed over the past 20 years for me. I talked about the challenges for publishers serving the chemistry community and how their business models are being challenged and how I empathize with the struggle to figure out how to deal with it. I talked about quality and how care must be taken when using information online. We are ALL challenged with errors - whether you consider PubChem, ChemSpider, Wikipedia or any of the other online databases they all have errors - how do you find them? Some of them are obvious and I pointed to obvious examples in the talk. I hoped to educate the attendees in regards to the value of InChI which, while not a perfect fit yet, is a great start to structure-based communication of chemistry. I publicly blessed the efforts of publishers such as the RSC and Nature Publishing group for the efforts they are making to support InChI and improve the quality of document presentation online. I blessed CAS as a treasure trove of information and the gold standard of curated chemistry. We need them all to be successful for the sake of our science. The challenge is how to fit into the ongoing proliferation of free access to information without modifying the business models.
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