Crowdsourcing Chemistry for the Community — 5 Year of Experiences by Antony Williams.
From the description:
ChemSpider is one of the internet’s primary resources for chemists. ChemSpider is a structure-centric platform and hosts over 26 million unique chemical entities sourced from over 400 different data sources and delivers information including commercial availability, associated publications, patents, analytical data, experimental and predicted properties. ChemSpider serves a rather unique role to the community in that any chemist has the ability to deposit, curate and annotate data. In this manner they can contribute their skills, and data, to any chemist using the system. A number of parallel projects have been developed from the initial platform including ChemSpider SyntheticPages, a community generated database of reaction syntheses, and the Learn Chemistry wiki, an educational wiki for secondary school students.
This presentation will provide an overview of the project in terms of our success in engaging scientists to contribute to crowdsouring chemistry. We will also discuss some of our plans to encourage future participation and engagement in this and related projects.
Perhaps not encouraging in terms of the rate of participation but certainly encouraging in terms of the impact of those who do participate.
I suspect the ratio of contributors to users isn’t that far off from those observed in open source projects.
On the whole, I take this as a plus sign for crowd-sourced curation projects, including topic maps.
I first saw this in a tweet by ChemConnector.