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Additional file 2. Additional data analysis and modeling information.

The ionization state of a chemical, reflected in pKa values, affects lipophilicity, solubility, protein binding and the ability of a chemical to cross the plasma membrane. These properties govern the pharmacokinetic parameters such as absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity and thus pKa is a fundamental chemical property and is used in many models of chemical toxicity. Experimentally determining pKa is not feasible for high-throughput assays. Predicting pKa is challenging and existing models have been developed only using restricted chemical space (e.g., anilines, phenols, benzoic acids, primary amines) and lack of a generalized model impedes ADME modeling. No free and open source models exist for heterogeneous chemical classes, however, several proprietary programs exist. In this work, pKa open data bundled with DataWarrior (http://www.openmolecules.org/) were used to develop predictive models for pKa. After data cleaning, there were ~3100 and ~3900 monoprotic chemicals with an acidic or basic pKa, respectively. 1D and 2D chemical descriptors (AlogP, Topological polar surface area, etc) in addition to 12 fingerprints (presence or absence of a chemical group) were generated using PaDEL software. Three datasets were used: acidic, basic and acidic and basic combined. 13 datasets were examined, the 1D/2D descriptors and 12 fingerprints. Using the Extreme Gradient Boosting algorithm showed that the MACCS and Substructure Count fingerprints yielded the best results, with models showing an R-Squared of ~0.78 and a RMSE of 1.42. Recently, Deep Learning models have showed remarkable progress in image recognition and natural language processing. To determine if the Deep Learning algorithms would increase model performance we examined the datasets and found that the Deep Learning models were somewhat superior than Extreme Gradient Boosting with an R-Squared of ~0.80 and an RMSE of ~1.38. This work does not reflect U.S. EPA policy. more...

The Royal Society of Chemistry publishes many thousands of articles per year, the majority of these containing rich chemistry data that, in general, in limited in its value when isolated only to the HTML or PDF form of the articles commonly consumed by readers. RSC also has an archive of over 300,000 articles containing rich chemistry data especially in the form of chemicals, reactions, property data and analytical spectra. RSC is developing a platform integrating these various forms of chemistry data. The data will be aggregated both during the manuscript deposition process as well as the result of text-mining and extraction of data from across the RSC archive. This presentation will report on the development of the platform including our success in extracting compounds, reactions and spectral data from articles. We will also discuss our developing process for handling data at manuscript deposition and the integration and support of eLab Notebooks (ELNS) in terms of facilitating data deposition and sourcing data. Each of these processes is intended to ensure long-term access to research data with the intention of facilitating improved discovery. more...

We provide an overview of the use we make of ontologies at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Our engagement with the ontology community began in 2006 with preparations for Project Prospect, which used ChEBI and other Open Biomedical Ontologies to mark up journal articles. Subsequently Project Prospect has evolved into DERA (Digitally Enhancing the RSC Archive) and we have developed further ontologies for text markup, covering analytical methods and name reactions. Most recently we have been contributing to CHEMINF, an open-source cheminformatics ontology, as part of our work on disseminating calculated physicochemical properties of molecules via the Open PHACTS. We show how we represent these properties and how it can serve as a template for disseminating different sorts of chemical information. more...

At a time when the data explosion has simply been redefined as “Big”, the hurdles associated with building a subject-specific data repository for chemistry are daunting. Combining a multitude of non-standard data formats for chemicals, related properties, reactions, spectra etc., together with the confusion of licensing and embargoing, and providing for data exchange and integration with services and platforms external to the repository, the challenge is significant. This all at a time when semantic technologies are touted as the fundamental technology to enhance integration and discoverability. Funding agencies are demanding change, especially a change towards access to open data to parallel their expectations around Open Access publishing. The Royal Society of Chemistry has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research of the UK to deliver a “chemical database service” for UK scientists. This presentation will provide an overview of the challenges associated with this project and our progress in delivering a chemistry repository capable of handling the complex data types associated with chemistry. The benefits of such a repository in terms of providing data to develop prediction models to further enable scientific discovery will be discussed and the potential impact on the future of scientific publishing will also be examined. more...

In recent years the Royal Society of Chemistry has become known for our development of freely accessible data platforms including ChemSpider, ChemSpider Reactions and our new chemistry data repository. In order to support drug discovery RSC participates in a number of projects including the Open PHACTS semantic web project, the PharmaSea natural products discovery project and the Open Source Drug Discovery project in collaboration with a team in India. Our most recent developments include extending our efforts to support neglected diseases by the provision of high quality datasets resulting from our curation efforts to support modeling, the delivery of enhanced application programming interfaces to allow open source drug discovery teams to both source and deposit data from our chemistry databases and the provision of a micropublishing platform to report on various aspects of work supporting neglected disease drug discovery. This presentation will review our existing efforts and our plans for extended development. more...

The ongoing drive towards mobile devices is now simply one of generic ubiquity. It is less an issue of whether a scientist has a mobile device but rather what brand, what generation and what apps do they have installed. Chemistry has fast been moving to mobile devices for a number of years now and today is it possible to draw chemical compounds, perform searches of databases both on device and in the cloud. Modeling of data using server based platforms is increasing in scope and capabilities. The Royal Society of Chemistry was early in recognizing the potential power of mobile platforms in terms to allowing scientists to access data and the benefits of such devices to allowing students access to data and content. This presentation will provide an overview of our efforts to date in supporting chemistry technologies on mobile devices and our recent developments in this domain. more...

The Royal Society of Chemistry has an archive of hundreds of thousands of published articles containing various types of chemistry related data – compounds, reactions, property data, spectral data etc. RSC has a vision of extracting as much of these data as possible and providing access via ChemSpider and its related projects. To this end we have applied a combination of text-mining extraction, image conversion and chemical validation and standardization approaches. The outcome of this project will result in new chemistry related data being added to our chemical and reaction databases and in the ability to more tightly couple web-based versions of the articles with these extracted data. The ability to search across the archive will be enhanced as a result. This presentation will report on our progress in this data extraction project and discuss how we will ultimately use similar approaches in our publishing pipeline to enhance article markup for new publications. more...

In many cases, an unknown to an investigator is actually known in the chemical literature, a reference database, or an internet resource. We refer to these types of compounds as “known unknowns.” ChemSpider is a very valuable internet database of known compounds useful in the identification of these types of compounds in commercial, environmental, forensic, and natural product samples. The database contains over 26 million entries from hundreds of data sources and is provided as a free resource to the community. Accurate mass mass spectrometry data is used to query the database by either elemental composition or a monoisotopic mass. Searching by elemental composition is the preferred approach. However, it is often difficult to determine a unique elemental composition for compounds with molecular weights greater than 600 Da. In these cases, searching by the monoisotopic mass is advantageous. In either case, the search results are refined by sorting the number of references associated with each compound in descending order. This raises the most useful candidates to the top of the list for further evaluation. These approaches were shown to be successful in identifying “known unknowns” noted in our laboratory and for compounds of interest to others. more...

"The traditional perception of the publishing process has been that it culminates in a print article. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has for many years been acutely aware that there is a wealth of information contained in scientific communications that we publish and that its true value can only be unlocked by enabling the discovery of the data within them. This is challenging due to the variety of ways that scientists provide data, textually, graphically, and increasingly in supplementary information. This talk will outline how the RSC has applied innovative approaches, developed both internally and externally, to identifying important chemical data within the literature and provides tools to anyone using chemical data to analyse and improve its quality. Examples will include: Project Prospect, the Experimental Data Checker, our CIF data importer, ChemSpider and our structure validation and standardization service." more...

Wikipedia has become the world’s most famous encyclopedia using as it’s platform the MediaWiki open source software. The software is supported not only by the MediaWiki foundation but by a community of developers who build widgets and add-ons to extend the capabilities. This presentation will review how MediaWiki has been used as a container for a number of resources of value to chemists, specifically SciMobileApps, SciDBs and ScientistsDB holding content regarding mobile scientific apps, scientific databases and scientists. We will also review how chemistry content within Wikipedia has been used to enhance the content underlying the RSC ChemSpider database and how the platform supports an educational environment for chemistry students. more...

The production of valid and appropriate chemical structure representations which are appropriate for deposition into chemical structure databases and for inclusion into scientific publications requires adoption of a set of pre-processing filters and standardization procedures. As part of our ongoing effort to improve the quality of data for deposition into the RSC ChemSpider database, to provide a manner by which to validate and prepare data for publication and to provide a valuable service to the chemistry community, we have delivered the ChemValidator online service. This website provides access to an intuitive user interface for the upload of chemical compounds in various formats, pre-processing and standardization relative to a defined set of standards and validation checking of the chemicals according to a number of rules including hypervalency, absence of stereochemistry and charge balance. This presentation will report on the development of ChemValidator. This presentation was given by David Sharpe at the ACS Fall Meeting in 2012 more...

Online databases containing high throughput screening and other property data continue to proliferate in number. Many pharmaceutical chemists will have used databases such as PubChem, ChemSpider, DrugBank, BindingDB and many others. This work will report on the potential value of these databases for providing data to be used to repurpose drugs using cheminformatics-based approaches (e.g. docking, ligand-based machine learning methods). This work will also discuss the potentially related applications of the Open PHACTS project, a European Union Innovative Medicines Initiative project, that is utilizing semantic web based approaches to integrate large scale chemical and biological data in new ways. We will report on how compound and data quality should be taken into account when utilizing data from online databases and how their careful curation can provide high quality data that can be used to underpin the delivery of molecular models that can in turn identify new uses for old drugs. more...

Presentation delivered by Colin Batchelor from the RSC eScience team at ACS New Orleans Spring Meeting April 2013. There are dozens of public compound databases now available online, some of these providing access to tens of millions of chemical compounds. However, very little effort has been put into the delivery of databases of chemical reactions with the majority of large resources being commercial in nature. In our five years of delivering chemical based data resources to the chemistry community one of the primary requests has been that chemists want to know how to synthesize many of the chemicals they are researching. This presentation will provide an overview of our concerted efforts to enhance access to freely available chemistry data and will discuss the ChemSpider Reactions as an integrating hub of content including data extracted from US patents, from RSC Journals and databases and from our micro-publishing platform ChemSpider Synthetic Pages (CSSP). more...

As a result of the advent of internet technologies supporting participation on the internet via blogs, wikis and other social networking approaches, chemists now have an opportunity to contribute to the growing chemistry content on the web. As scientists an important skill to develop is the ability to succinctly report in a published format the details of scientific experimentation. The Royal Society of Chemistry provides a number of online systems to share chemistry data, the most well known of these being the ChemSpider database. In parallel the ChemSpider SyntheticPages (CSSP) platform is an online publishing platform for scientists, and especially students, to publish the details of chemical syntheses that they have performed. Using the rich capabilities of internet platforms, including the ability to display interactive spectral data and movies, CSSP is an ideal environment for students to publish their work, especially syntheses that might not support mainstream publication. more...

There is an overwhelming number of new resources for chemistry that would likely benefit both librarians and students in terms of improving access to data and information. While commercial solutions provided by an institution may be the primary resources there is now an enormous range of online tools, databases, resources, apps for mobile devices and, increasingly, wikis. This presentation will provide an overview of how wiki-based resources for scientists are developing and will introduce a number of developing wikis. These include wikis that are being used to teach chemistry to students as well as to source information about scientists, scientific databases and mobile apps. more...

High quality chemical databases are struggling with protecting their data from the flow of wild machine-generated chemistry and lower-quality data. The period of primarily human curation prior to deposition in a database is gone and quality-conscious databases need to heavily rely on automated validation checks. An automated chemical validation system is being developed by the cheminformatics team at the Royal Society of Chemistry to be the “quality gatekeeper” of databases at the point of deposition. ChemSpider is leading a community-wide standardization approach starting with our support of the Open PHACTS semantic web project, an Innovative Medicines Initiative. The Chemical Validation and Standardization Platform (CVSP) is being designed as an open, flexible chemical validation and standardization platform that validates and standardizes chemical records. This presentation will review the existing beta version of the system and work in progress. more...

We are all benefiting from a shift towards openness fed by Open Source, Open Standards, Open Data and Open Access. Open Notebook Science is likely the scientific revolution of the near term. As more scientists become comfortable with the concepts of openly sharing their experiments and data, often in near real time, we are seeing a shift to significant increases in the availability of new data that does not have to be extracted from publications but is available as data feeds that can be delivered to the community. This presentation will provide an overview of how the ChemSpider database from the RSC supports Open Notebook Science using programmatic access to both data and services and how ChemSpider ingests data feeds to mesh together with our existing database of over 27 million chemical compounds. more...

In recent years, in parallel with the general broad trend of information proliferation, many tens of public chemical databases have been created and made available using internet technologies. In many cases fluent data exchange has occurred between these various databases as they source information from one another. While this has the advantages of linking together multiple data sources the results also include the proliferation of errors across the various databases. The lack of a public authority to resolve such errors significantly affects the quality of freely accessible chemical information. While ChemSpider has previously allowed a crowdsourcing approach to curation efforts have now migrated to addressing this problem using a "federated resolver" approach. This presentation will report on our work in this area. more...

The Royal Society of Chemistry has an archive of published journals and books stretching back to 1841. In the past decade we have digitized this archive and semantically enriched our frontfile data with chemical structures linked to our free online chemical compound database, ChemSpider. In this talk we will survey our recent efforts to extract all kinds of data – chemical structures, experimental and bibliographic data – from both our backfile and frontfile. We will also discuss our future work to extract chemical reactions to host in our ChemSpider Reactions database and will discuss the potential applications of optical structure recognition technologies for converting structure images to structures as well as using similar techniques to convert experimental spectral data into interactive data formats. A key aspect of this project is the delivery of a crowdsourcing platform for the interactive annotation and validation of the extracted data. more...

ChemSpider is one of the chemistry community’s primary public compound databases. Containing tens of millions of chemical compounds and its associated data ChemSpider serves data to many tens of websites and software applications at this point. This presentation will provide an overview of the expanding reach of the ChemSpider platform and the nature of solutions that it helps to enable. We will also discuss some of the future directions for the project that are envisaged and how we intend to continue expanding the impact for the platform. more...

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) hosts a number of resources of direct benefit to teaching chemistry. One of these resources, ChemSpider, is a free chemical database containing data for millions of chemical compounds. The data includes thousands of spectra, primarily contributed by members of the scientific community as ChemSpider depends on crowdsourcing for certain types of data. The NMR spectral data hosted on ChemSpider are integrated to various other RSC systems including an educational wiki and a micropublishing platform for reaction syntheses. The data are also available programmatically to the community and have been used as the basis of a game to teach NMR spectroscopy. more...

The Royal Society of Chemistry hosts an online resource, ChemSpider, as a structure centric database for chemists linking over 25 million chemicals to 400 internet sites. As a crowdsourced environment members of the chemistry community can deposit spectral data to the database. Almost 2000 NMR spectra have been submitted to the database and these are the basis of both a gaming environment for learning NMR spectroscopy, the SpectralGame, as well as a new teaching environment known as SpectraSchool. This presentation will provide an overview of these two online resources and how they may be utilized for the purpose of teaching NMR spectroscopy in an Undergraduate Curriculum. more...

In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of freely accessible online databases serving the chemistry community. These databases are diverse in nature and encompass chemical vendor catalogs, government-funded research results, definitively focused and highly curated collections and large-scale information aggregators. As a result the internet theoretically now represents a rich array of chemistry data that can be utilized for the purpose of data-mining, for utilizing in computer models, and for integrating into other systems to expand data accessibility and aid drug discovery. With this dramatic improvement in accessibility comes a responsibility to ensure that the data are as high a quality as possible. This will ensure that time is not wasted in erroneous searches, that models are underpinned by accurate data and that the improved discoverability of online resources is not marred by the delivery of incorrect data. This paper represents an overview of some of the experiences of the authors in utilizing online chemical compound databases, critiques some of the approaches being taken to assemble data and suggests alternative approaches to collaborate to deliver definitive reference data sources for the community to utilize. more...

Chemistry online is represented in various ways including publications, presentations, blog posts, wiki-contributions, data depositions, curations and annotations. Encouraging participation from the community to participate in and comment on the information delivered via these various formats would likely provide for a rich dialog exchange in some cases and improved data quality in others. At the Royal Society of Chemistry we have a number of platforms that are amenable to contribution. This presentation will provide an overview of our experiences in engaging the community to interact with our various forms of content and discuss new approaches we are utilizing to encourage crowdsourced participation. more...