IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI)-related education and training materials through InChI Open Education Resource (OER)

Abstract

The IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is a structure-based chemical identifier that encodes various aspects of a chemical structure into a hierarchically layered line notation. Because InChI is non-proprietary, open-source, and freely available to everyone, it is adopted in popular chemical information resources and software programs. This paper describes the InChI Open Education Resource (OER) (https://www.inchi-trust.org/oer/), designed to provide educators and other interested parties with resources, training material, and information related to InChI. Currently, the OER contains over 100 materials collected from various sources and provides users with search, filtering, and sorting functionalities to locate specific records. New relevant materials can be suggested by anyone, allowing the scientific community to share and find InChI-related resources. This paper will show how to use the InChI OER tag taxonomy to filter content and demonstrate two resources within the InChI OER; the ChemNames2LCSS Google Sheet and the InChILayersExplorer, an Excel spreadsheet that breaks an InChI into its layers. While the InChI OER is of value to a broader chemistry community, this paper seeks to reach out to chemical educators and provide them with an understanding of InChI and its role in the practice of science.