Royal Society of Chemistry announces a new repository for the chemical sciences

The Royal Society of Chemistry today announces a new subject-based repository that will make it easier for researchers to find and share relevant journal articles and data from a single point of access.
 
David James, the Royal Society of Chemistry's Executive Director of Strategic Innovation, said: "The Chemical Sciences Repository will offer free-to-access chemistry publications and integrated data in a single place. 
 
"This repository extends the services the Royal Society of Chemistry already offers researchers. With this new service we are improving our ability to ensure that the outputs from research activity are made as widely available as possible - to meet the needs of the scientific community, funders and others interested in accessing our content in a more comprehensive, streamlined way."
 
The initial release will provide an article repository as a central point through which users can access the Royal Society of Chemistry's open access articles, whether they are funded immediate open access articles, or articles that must be made open access after an embargo period, such as those funded by RCUK, the Wellcome Trust or NIH. This article repository will be available at the end of October 2013.
 
The repository will point to the Article of Record as the primary source. It will make open access versions of the article available when any embargo period expires. 
 
David James continued: "We plan to grow the Chemical Sciences Repository, with the addition of open access papers from institutional repositories, other publishers, and individuals - as well as theses, data and models.  
 
"The repository will make it easy for researchers to deposit their articles and data, and scientists will also find it easy to find and reuse compatible datasets. 
 
"As a community service the repository will catalyse further collaboration and open innovation between chemical scientists all over the world."
 
The Royal Society of Chemistry will announce additional elements to the data repository in the coming months. Work is already underway with major UK universities around data extraction and upload, Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) integration, and micropublishing. Offering functionality with chemical scientists specifically in mind, the repository will support the building of validation and prediction models to maximise the value and quality of the data collections. 
 
Head of Chemistry at the University of Southampton, Professor Philip Gale, said: " My colleagues and I welcome this initiative: a collection of chemistry data curated by the Royal Society of Chemistry will be of significant value to the worldwide chemistry community. 
 
"We are now working with the Royal Society of Chemistry to enable best practice, to expose laboratory data in an intelligent and usable manner."