The RSC organized a Science Question Time with representatives from all of the major political parties in the Parliament in front of a live audience drawn from the Scottish science and engineering community.

There were questions asked by audience members and by people watching from home.

This event provided an opportunity for the science community to raise the profile of science in the run-up to the Scottish General Election on 5 May 2011.

With an intention to provide a free internet resource of chemistry related data for the community, ChemSpider provides an online database of chemical compounds, reaction syntheses and related data. Members of the community can contribute to the database via the deposition of chemical structures, synthesis procedures and analytical data. Data are also aggregated from many other depositors, at present over 400 data sources. The aggregation of data associated with over 25 million chemical...

This presentation was a presentation to a group of chemistry students at Drexel University. The premise of this presentation was an overview of the ChemSpider search engine and database but during the process of teaching about ChemSpider an overview of various aspects of internet based chemistry were given. This included: the quality of chemistry-related data online, an overview of InChIs as a basis for searching the internet by chemical structure and semantic markup of chemistry articles.

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...