The Blue Obelisk - An update after 5 years

The Blue Obelisk group was established at the Spring ACS Meeting in 2005. Following on from the presentation/poster I gave at PMR's Symposium in January, I put together an overview of the activities of the group over the past 5 years with help from Rajarshi Guha, Egon Willighagen and Peter Murray-Rust, and further contributions on particular projects from many more.

This paper has just appeared in Journal of Cheminformatics as part of the PMR Symposium themed issue:
Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards in chemistry: The Blue Obelisk five years on Noel M O'Boyle, Rajarshi Guha, Egon L Willighagen, Samuel E Adams, Jonathan Alvarsson, Jean-Claude Bradley, Igor V Filippov, Robert M Hanson, Marcus D Hanwell, Geoffrey R Hutchison, Craig A James, Nina Jeliazkova, Andrew SID Lang, Karol M Langner, David C Lonie, Daniel M Lowe, Jerome Pansanel, Dmitry Pavlov, Ola Spjuth, Christoph Steinbeck, Adam L Tenderholt, Kevin J Theisen, Peter Murray-Rust.
Journal of Cheminformatics 2011, 3:37.

Here's the abstract:

Background

The Blue Obelisk movement was established in 2005 as a response to the lack of Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source (ODOSOS) in chemistry. It aims 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.

Results
This contribution looks back on the work carried out by the Blue Obelisk in thjavascript:void(0)e past 5 years and surveys progress and remaining challenges in the areas of Open Data, Open Standards, and Open Source in chemistry.

Conclusions
We show that the Blue Obelisk has been very successful in bringing together researchers and developers with common interests in ODOSOS, leading to development of many useful resources freely available to the chemistry community.

Check out the other papers in the themed series over at Journal of Cheminformatics.