ChemNews.Com VOL 9 NO 4

ChemACX.Com and ChemFinder.Com are powerful databases, containing an enormous volume of information about molecular structures on the Internet and for chemical e-commerce. Exchanging information about chemicals, however, has remained difficult.

The problem of uniquely and unambiguously identifying a compound has not really been solved. Proprietary registries are available, but access to the data can be expensive and it is not universal.

To solve this problem and provide an open forum for e-commerce and Internet publishing, CambridgeSoft developed the ACX (Available Chemicals Xchange) Number and ChemACX Registry. Each compound in ChemACX and ChemFinder.Com, as well as compounds from many other sources, have been assigned ACX numbers.

The ACX number is designed to facilitate Internet publishing and chemical purchasing following open-standards guidelines. Access to ACX numbers is free to the scientific community! The repository on www.ChemFinder.com contains ACX numbers for all of its compounds, as does ChemACX.Com. There are no restrictions on publishing or using ACX numbers in journals, chemical catalogs, or in e-commerce.

Finding an ACX Number

By using www.ChemFinder.com, you can search by chemical name, structure, and a host of other fields to quickly find your compound. The ACX number is returned with the results.

Unlisted Compounds

If a compound isn't in the database, you can submit it for registration to the ACX registry. After confirming the compound is unique, it is assigned an ACX number and added to the database, along with any other information provided (published physical properties, links to web sites, etc.). You are automatically e-mailed the results.

E-Commerce

By using ACX Numbers, you can track chemicals throughout your organization and use them for inventory tracking, recording syntheses in notebooks, etc. With the ChemACX database, you have an instant cross-reference from ACX numbers to the hundreds of vendor-specific resources. You can search over 200 catalogs in ChemACX by ACX number.

Internet Publishing

The ACX Registry is the way to publish on the Internet. Simply do the following:

1. Put up your web pages with the information or articles you want. Be sure to have ACX numbers in the text and tables of your article(s).

2. Connect to ChemFinder.Com and add the information. ChemFinder will prompt you for the structure or ACX number, author information, and URL to your pages.

3. The information is reviewed and added to ChemFinder.Com.

ChemFinder Site Indexing

How to index a site with ChemFinder is one of the most common requests the ChemFinder.Com staff receives. Since ChemFinder.Com is the definitive directory for Internet chemical information, people want their sites referenced by compound. The easiest way to do this is by putting the ACX number(s) on your site and submitting the URL to ChemFinder. By listing ACX numbers, ChemFinder can automatically index your site and provide links.

Start Here

Connect now to www.ChemFinder.com to see how ACX numbers work and are used. The next time you publish an article, put up a web page and submit the information to ChemFinder. ChemFinder will index your article by chemical structure, name, synonym, and, of course, ACX Number.