Royal Society of Chemistry acquires MarinLit

David James, Executive Director of Strategic Innovation at the Royal Society of Chemistry, said: "We are delighted to announce that we have completed the acquisition of MarinLit. 

"Over the last 25 years John Blunt, Murray Munro and their colleagues at the University of Canterbury have developed the leading marine natural product (MNP) database, a powerful tool in support of the varied areas of MNP research and we are very excited to welcome MarinLit into the Royal Society of Chemistry's portfolio. It makes an excellent strategic fit with our current activities and natural product research." 

The combination of the Royal Society of Chemistry's natural product content, such as the high impact journal Natural Product Reports, with MarinLit data will further advance the Royal Society of Chemistry's mission to become the world's leading chemistry community, helping the world's researchers access the best chemical information and share the best ideas.

MarinLit addresses a rising challenge for MNP researchers; where is the best place to start your research search? The unique element of MarinLit is that in addition to the usual bibliographic data, the database contains an extensive collection of keywords, trivial names and compound information. All of these terms can be searched for either individually or in various combinations. This provides researchers with the ultimate destination to start their search for any marine natural product research. 

Murray Munro, co-founder of MarinLit with John Blunt, said: "We have been on a great journey with MarinLit over the last 25 years. MarinLit has been a passion for us and we have endeavoured to make it the best possible database and research support tool for the MNP chemist. 

"John and I both retired and came to the view that it is time for us to pass over the responsibility of MarinLit. A couple of years ago we were approached by the Royal Society of Chemistry - knowing their strengths in developing web-based knowledge delivery systems, we became very comfortable with the prospect of them taking over responsibility for MarinLit.

"We started off distributing the data in MarinLit on floppy discs, we moved to CD Roms and now it is all done by the cloud! Technology has evolved at warp speed but the quality of data held in MarinLit stayed the same, world leading, making it the ultimate destination for researchers to start their search for any marine natural product research."

David James added: "We are looking forward to working with John and Murray to manage this transition and continue to develop MarinLit's future. We will continue to support and enhance MarinLit, our first development will be to produce a web based version, which will be ready in early 2014. 

"MarinLit has gone from the floppy disc to the cloud and from one partnership to another."