[curiouscat]

Are there any Chemical Reaction Database alternatives to Beilstein, now Reaxys?

Maybe not in its full glory but any simpler / smaller versions? Curious if any attempts have been made or if any projects are on.

Only one I came across was www.orgsyn.org which seems similar but tiny?

PS. Does Beilstein even have any commercial competitors? Or is it essentially a monopoly.

[AWK]

search for "chematica" (also commercial).

[curiouscat]

search for "chematica" (also commercial).

Thanks! I now remember having read of that a few months ago but it seems all cloak and daggers. There's hardy anyway to try it. Wonder if public funding went into his work.

[IsotopeBill]

Not really a reaction database, but if you're looking for the prep of a particular compound, this site will return article citations:
http://www.chemsynthesis.com/

and this site has lots of info on organic chemistry in general, with lots of illustrative examples:
http://www.organic-chemistry.org/

These don't really answer your question, but I've found them quite helpful.  Even the expensive commercial databases are not fully complete

[IsotopeBill]

I neglected this one:
http://www.chemspider.com/

Still not what you asked for, but useful nonetheless

[discodermolide]

I think the short answer is no. There are bits and pieces of Beilstein like web sites but nothing with the search capabilities. http://www.name-reaction.com is up and coming but the website is not finished yet. They are still checking the details.

[curiouscat]

I think the short answer is no. There are bits and pieces of Beilstein like web sites but nothing with the search capabilities. http://www.name-reaction.com is up and coming but the website is not finished yet. They are still checking the details.

Interesting. Looks like a big hole in the area; wonder how come this sort of project never got funded in the millions of $$ that NSF etc. hand out? Seems like a critical knowledge-base and a bit iffy having to depend on a few select vendors. e.g. what happens if Reaxys' parent goes bankrupt?

Doesn't sound like rocket-science but a lot of systematic and assiduous book-keeping.

Maybe because this stuff isn't glamorous? So no researcher really wants to do it? Not the sort of thing that gets you a Nobel....

[discodermolide]

This has always been a hole in the area. It costs a lot of time and money to set up such a searchable database.I know, I set one up for a small chemical distributor here. It tok me about 9 months to complete, not including the cost of software and web publishing. This was only a compound search, reactions, including sub-structures would have taken much longer.

[fledarmus]

Beilstein is a very old database - it started as Friedrich Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry in 1881 and has been adding reactions and organic compounds as they were reported in the chemical literature ever since. It is combined with Leopold Gmelin's Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry, which was started in 1887. The truth is there simply isn't anybody out there who has been keeping track of every new organic and inorganic chemical as it is discovered for nearly this long.

The Chemical Abstracts database started with a somewhat different purpose in the early 1900's, but the indexing system has evolved to the point where it forms a similar reaction and compound database. It is the database that underlies Scifinder.

Anybody that wanted to start a new database now would either have to use one of these databases or attempt to create one from scratch. It doesn't make any sense for a government agency to start from ground zero and build a database that has been operating for over 100 years on a solid commercial footing. And it certainly doesn't make sense for a company that has been building a database for this long to just give it away. Instead, what the NSF and other science funding agencies try to do is build enough money into their grants to pay for their researchers to access at least one of these two databases. Almost all research universities have student and researcher access to at least one of these two databases as well, because they are indispensible for chemical research. Yes, they are expensive - good tools usually are, especially considering the amount of literature they have to comb through every year to keep it up-to-date.