The Organic Division Launches a New Organic Chemistry Data Website

Categories: News

The ACS Organic Division has been hard at work this summer and is now ready to release a new resource for organic chemists: https://organicchemistrydata.org/

The idea and majority of the current content (~1500 html pages and 650 PDF files) of the Organic Chemistry Data website has come from the late Professor Hans J. Reich who served his entire professional academic career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Upon his untimely death in 2020, the ACS Organic Division offered to assist in maintaining Professor Reich’s extensive online resources which have impacted the organic chemistry community worldwide. This new website not only contains Prof. Reich’s collection of resources, which we have merged with our extensive “links page” to create a single list of ~300 website resources on organic chemistry (approximately 35 are to resources in our Reich Collection). The linked pages have been selected for ease of use, broad applicability, and quality of coverage. Topics include: Reaction Info, Chemical Data, Spectroscopy Resources, Organic Compound Info, Safety, Chemical Societies & Portals, Literature Sources, Laboratory Techniques, Useful Software, Resources for Educators and Students, and Organic Chemistry Videos.

We hope that the data and information resources, and the links to resources off of this new website, provide organic chemists quick access to high quality information that will facilitate their efforts in the laboratory and the classroom. Links to resources off of this website will assist individuals in finding high quality information; they are not, however, an endorsement of any product, service, or website.

Highlights on the Reich Collection of Resources:

  • ~700 Total Syntheses searchable and categorized by compound name, named reactions used, chemoselectivity, rings formed, reaction types, reagents used, and year of publication. In most of these modes, selecting the synthesis in a particular category presents the synthesis with a blinking red arrow to highlight where the reagent, named reaction, reaction type, or ring appear in the synthetic scheme.
  • A comprehensive Topics in NMR database (e.g. spin systems, chemical shifts, coupling constants, multinuclear NMR)
  • An NMR Spectral Database with ~650 high quality NMR spectra (PDF files) which are searchable and grouped by functional group, molecular formula, NMR spin systems, techniques (i.e. cyclohexane stereochemistry & 2D), multinuclear (D, T, P, F, B, Se, Si, Sn, N), and spectral level (i.e. trivial–advanced).
  • Information on some of the fundamentals of organic chemistry. e.g. pKa tables, electron pushing, A-values, nomenclature, organometallic chemistry (esp. organolithium reagents), pericyclic reactions, reduction and oxidation reactions.

Professor Hans J. Reich was born May 6, 1943 in Danzig, Germany. After earning a B.Sc. at the University of Alberta in 1964, he entered graduate school at UCLA, receiving a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1968 (with D. J. Cram). In graduate school, he met fellow organic chemistry student Ieva Lazdins, and they married in 1969. The two were lifelong companions, socially and scientifically. After graduate school, he spent two years as a postdoctoral associate supported by a Canadian National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, the first at CalTech (with J. D. Roberts) and the second at Harvard (with R. B. Woodward). In 1970, he joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, establishing what soon became an internationally recognized research program in physical-organic chemistry, publishing 157 papers throughout his career. Fittingly, Professor Reich received the James Flack Norris Award in Physical-Organic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 2012. Additionally, he was a pioneer in distribution of educational content via the world wide web. He began teaching himself programming in the late 1990s, producing new freeware programs, WinPLT and WinDNMR. These programs managed chemical structure drawings, NMR spectra annotations, and simulations cohesively. As an outgrowth of these endeavors, he began the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Organic Chemistry Information webpage in which he accumulated and curated information for the broader chemistry community to use free of charge.

The vast majority of work setting up this website involved converting the content of Prof. Reich’s websites into content that is viewable/useable on a broad range of electronic devices. This was possible through the immense volunteer efforts of Organic Division Assistant Webmaster Dr. Khoi Van (Ph.D., in Organic Chemistry with Professor Daniel Romo) with initial oversight, support, and direction from Organic Division Webmaster Brian Myers (Ph.D., Organic Chemistry with Professor David R. Williams) and Organic Division Head Webmaster Joseph Ward (Ph.D., Organic Chemistry with Professor Robert Maleczka).

We are grateful to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, especially the Department of Chemistry, for their support of this project. We also thank his wife, Dr. Ieva L. Reich, and her family for graciously supporting this project.

This website (https://organicchemistrydata.org/) is freely available to everyone, and is for the organic chemistry community. It is underwritten and maintained by the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry. The Division’s funding for projects like this comes from membership fees. Please consider supporting this program, and the other Division programs that foster and promote the advancement of the field of organic chemistry, by joining the division: https://www.organicdivision.org/join/.