Finding relevant chemical safety information before doing benchwork is a challenge. Safety information resources are produced by a wide range of organizations such as governmental and regulatory agencies, professional societies and non-profit organizations, and chemical suppliers and publishers. The types of information available include substance ID, physical properties, personal protection equipment, storage and handling, waste disposal, emergency response, and toxicology. While many resources focus on individual substances, some resources cover classes of compounds. Many resources only include information on individual substances rather than chemical reactions. Safety information may be published in resources such as safety datasheets, journal articles, handbooks and encyclopedias, books, websites, databases, plus more. Despite this cornucopia of information, chemists observe and encounter unexpected problems and reactions at the bench, and researchers and librarians discover key information from the literature that is not compiled in commonly used resources. Capturing these experiences and information is needed to fill this gap. This presentation will focus on three crowd-sourced resources - The Safety Net, Not Voodoo X.4, and the Pistoia Alliance Chemical Safety Library - whose content is being created to help address the gap and provide practical information to chemists.  After learning about these resources, we hope that you will help add content to them too.

Minding the gap of chemical safety information resources: the importance of crowd-sourced content

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.