The Open Chemistry project promotes open source, data, and standards. | opensource.com

"Chemistry is not the most open field of scientific endeavor; in fact, as I began working more in the area (coming from a background in physics), I was surprised with the norms in the field. As a PhD student way back in 2003, I simply wanted to draw a 3D molecular structure on my operating system of choice (Linux), and be able to save an image for a paper/poster discussing my research. This proved to be nearly impossible, and in 2005 a group of like-minded researchers got together at a meeting of the American Chemical Society and formed an unorganization: The Blue Obelisk (named after their meeting place in San Diego). The Blue Obelisk In 2006, the original group published a paper entitled, The BlueObelisk—Interoperability in Chemical Informatics, which detailed the aims of the unorganization, succinctly captured as open data, open standards, and open source (ODOSOS); but not necessarily open access. In fact, that first article is locked behind a paywall. The second article, Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards in chemistry: The Blue Obelisk five years on, summarizes the progress made in the first five years, and was published as open access to be available to all. It states the core aims of the group: ' ... to make it easier to carry out chemistry research by promoting interoperability between chemistry software, encouraging cooperation between Open Source developers, and developing community resources and Open Standards.'  The Blue Obelisk has served as a nucleation point for a large array of researchers and developers in fields as diverse as molecules, reactions, computational chemistry, spectra, and crystallography (beyond the original aim of chemical informatics). This also exposes a large number of open source toolkits (such as Open Babel, RDKit, CDK,and Indigo) that are written in C++ or Java with bindings to many other languages. There are also several 'second-generation' tools building on these toolkits, such as Avogadro and Bioclipse. In addition to open source, significant development has taken place in developing open standards, such as the Chemical Markup Language, InChI, Open SMILES, and QSAR-ML, which are improving the state of data exchange in chemistry. Open data efforts have also provided valuable resources such as the Blue Obelisk Data Repository, which offers a liberally-licensed, curated dataset ..."