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Our survey of free chemistry databases and services on the Web takes us today to a big name in traditional scientific publishing who is slowly, perhaps reluctantly, making the transition to the Web. The Electronic Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis (e-EROS) is the "electronic" companion to the excellent and widely-used Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis published by Wiley.

e-EROS, like the print version, is organized around reagents. You can browse by reagent name (listed alphabetically) or apparently search by structure using a Windows-only plugin. Unfortunately, I was unable to successfully install the plugin and only received a cryptic message about contacting my system administrator for information on how to do it. Text-searching is also available.

Each entry contains information about the chemical structure, physical properties, and preparation of a particular substance. From what I can tell, the selection of reagents is similar to that contained in the print version, although according to the publisher the "Editorial Board are keeping e-EROS up-to-date by regularly adding new reagents and catalysts, and by updating existing articles whenever felt necessary".

Navigation of e-EROS content can be tricky. After landing on the main page of an entry, you may come to the conclusion that only an abstract is available, because that's the only thing showing in the content frame. But the left-hand navigation takes you to a full article complete with bibliographical references. Good use is made of hyperlinks to other e-EROS content.

e-EROS has also implemented an intriguing idea: each entry in the encyclopedia has been assigned a DOI. For an example, see dimethylaminopyridine.

The Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis is an extremely useful reference work. Although the e-EROS site has some usability issues, much of the utility of the print work is now available from the convenience of your own computer.

Kudos

• Full, high-quality content available for free.
• Separate DOIs for each entry.
• Good use of internal hyperlinks.

Ideas for Improvement

• Make structure searching more obvious. Although there is a certain product that would work quite well here ;-), the important thing is that no chemist should need to read pages of documentation and/or contact their "system adminstrator" just to do a structure search.
• Use DOI hyperlinks in bibliography entries. A link in the bibliography section should take you directly to the article. The current system, after a few hope-raising clicks, often leads to dead ends.
• Eliminate frames - your users will thank you.
• Display the entire article, not just the abstract, on entry landing page. The current system hides the fact that the entire article can be read online for free.

Update: Actually, substructure searching can be accomplished without plugins on most systems. The trick is to first select "Substructure" from the pull-down menu on the search page. This creates a popup window containing a Java-based structure editor. The editor doesn't appear until the pull-down selection is made.