Preserving and Exploiting Molecular Diversity: Deposit and Exchange of Chemical Information and Chemical Samples

Starting with volume 2 of the journal Molecules [1], the nonprofit international organization MDPI will provide, in addition to the sample deposit services, the service for the deposit of information (experimental data, particularly spectroscopic data). Preserving and exploiting molecular diversity for both information and samples will continue to be the goal the journal Molecules and the organization MDPI strives for.

Unlike other fields of science, chemists contribute not only a large volume of knowledge (chemical information) but also virtual substance (chemical samples) of various molecules. These two aspects of contribution constitute the precious molecular diversity [2].

However, we know that most of the chemical samples exist only on paper. Nevertheless, the loss of chemical samples [3] can be avoided by coordinated efforts of chemical samples registration, collection, deposit and exchange, in addition to the peerreviewed high-quality publication of normal research reports. Molecules is the first chemistry journal to encourage authors to register and exchange their available chemical samples. This has been quite successful for the publication of the first volume in 1996 and has set an example to other chemistry journals [4]. The editor will continue to insist on this policy.

We intend to publish in volume 2 very short posters of synthetic works and the data of the structural characterization which can be one molecule (one structure) per paper and can be as short as one page only. Such publications in Molecules will serve as the experimental data deposit. This project is interesting because a large volume of very precious chemical information, particularly the very diverse works of synthesis and structural characterization have either never been published or the submitted papers were rejected by editors because they were too trivial (normally because it belonged to the classical scope of chemistry, i.e., pure synthetic or pure spectroscopic measurements), or the chemists themselves never planned to publish such works for individual compounds and isolated data because they thought them not publishable in a traditional journal. We believe that synthesis and structural elucidation of individual compounds are still the essence of chemistry and the material foundation of other research.

The ready publication of all scattered unassembled data for individual compounds in Molecules as short posters will provide a bank for chemists to deposit all of their information of synthesis and structural characterization, together with the sample availability information. Those works that have no compound samples available will also be published. When a large volume of (say 1 million) structures is published in this way and also constructed as a retrievable databank, it will be a very useful treasure to all chemists and other re-lated scientists. If every synthetic chemist contributes 100 such posters, this number will be easily reached within several years.