Blog November 2019

Announcing a modern, highly flexible licensing system 

The current licensing system for the CSD has served us well for over 20 years, but it is finally starting to show its age. It ties us in to a yearly release cycle and limits the components that we may individually licence. It comes from a time before virtual machines existed and is not fully compatible with the world of computers that we now live in. As such we are excited to announce a long overdue licensing system upgrade will be rolled out as part of our 2020.0 CSD release this December.

In the year that the CSD hit one million structures we wanted to highlight and thank some of the most prolific contributors to the database. The 10^th and final person in this series is Brian W. Skelton.  Brian is currently 1^st in our annual CSD author statistics and so we wanted to thank him for his contributions by doing what we do best – searching the CSD!

Using data driven insights to inform the future of the CSD

With the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) reaching a million structures earlier this year, there is now, more than ever, the opportunity to harness the power of this data through effective visualisation, analysis and extraction.

Quick and easy hydrogen-bond likelihood analysis

We are excited to announce that we will be launching H-bond Coordination Quick-View in Mercury as part of our upcoming 2020.0 release in December!  This latest development will enable quick and easy hydrogen-bond likelihood analysis using coordination numbers for the observed structure. 

In the year that the CSD hit one million structures we wanted to highlight and thank some of the most prolific contributors to the database. The 9^th person in this series is Allan H. White who is currently 2^nd in our annual CSD author statistics!

2019 has been an exciting year for CCDC.  We've attended many conferences both in the UK and internationally, delivered workshops worldwide, formed a new scientific advisory board, and of course reached a million structures in the Cambridge Structural Database!  We've also been growing our team both in the UK and the US to help us continue our mission of advancing structural science into 2020 and beyond.   We'd like to introduce one of our newest team members, Rob Willacy, who joins us from GSK. He tells us about his passion for understanding solid state chemical problems  and how he hopes to apply his experience at CCDC to drive the centre's materials tools and services.

In the year that the CSD hit one million structures, we wanted to highlight and thank some of the most prolific contributors to the database. Our 8^th CSD Hero in this series is Arnold L. Rheingold who currently sits 3^rd in our annual CSD author statistics!

The introduction of the CSD Python API in 2015 has been transformative in structural science research both within the CCDC and across our user community. 

Driving the future of structural science 

The CCDC US user group meeting was held on October 17 in Philadelphia. Users from the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, academia and partner companies came together to discuss the latest developments in the CCDC product roadmap and provide input on future direction.

In the year that the CSD hit one million structures, we have been highlighting some of the most prolific contributors to the database. The 7^th person in our CSD Heroes series is P.G.Jones.  Peter is currently 4^th in our annual CSD author statistics!  We we wanted to thank him for his contributions by doing what we do best – searching the CSD!