ACD/Labs has been fueling the advancement of scientific research since 1998 by providing scientists access to its software tools.
One of the company's primary goals, it says, has been to ensure that the academic community has access to a chemical structure drawing package enabling accurate representation of chemical structures and inclusion into lab reports.
In order to facilitate standardization within an academic environment, it has offered site licenses of its drawing software together with assistance to support the deployment process.
With over 250 donations of site licenses to date, ACD/Labs's software continues to provide a significant impact on a major segment of the academic scientific community.
Academic institutions worldwide have adopted ChemSketch, an advanced chemical structure drawing software, as an interactive teaching tool to simplify and convey chemistry concepts to their students.
Among many other features, this product offers tautomer prediction, 2D structure cleaning, 3D optimization and viewing, and drawing of polymers, organometallics, and Markush structures.
With the added InChI chemical nomenclature protocol compatibility, and access to PubChem, ChemSketch can be used to search chemical databases directly from the software interface according to structure or substructure searches.
To date, over 270 academic institutions worldwide have chosen ChemSketch as their standard chemical drawing package, and over 600,000 chemists have downloaded the freeware version.
ACD/Labs offers a wide range of software tools for teaching and research.
From the freeware chemical structure drawing package to the industry standard systematic naming tools, PhysChem, and NMR prediction software, ACD/Labs claims an unsurpassed range of software products to facilitate academic research and make the teaching process interactive, memorable, and rewarding.
It recently announced that the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University purchased a site license of 2D NMR Processor which supports all major NMR formats and provides exceptional capabilities for desktop processing, analyzing, and interpretation.
ACD/Labs has also provided Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Oxford University, and numerous other academic facilities, with site-wide access to its prediction algorithms and databases via an Internet service.
Antony Williams, VP and chief science officer at ACD/Labs, comments: "ChemSketch has become the freeware standard chemical structure drawing package for students in secondary schools, colleges, universities, and other educational establishments.
"Our site licensing programme serves to assist academic organizations in standardizing on a platform for structure representation and exchange.
"Educators worldwide now make use of this platform for developing lesson plans and introducing their students to the benefits of chemistry software.
"We welcome the opportunity to support the professional scientists of tomorrow with our tools today."
