Open Chemistry: Avogadro 1.90, GSoC 2017, and More

It has been a while since we last updated the blog on our Open Chemistry activities. Our Avogadro paper published in 2012 just passed 1,000 citations on Google Scholar, and 725 according to Springer’s metrics. We made a maintenance release of Avogadro 1.2.0, and an updated Avogadro 2 1.90.0 release as we integrated improvements made during last year’s Google Summer of Code.

We have put in a proposal for this year’s Google Summer of Code, and have expanded our umbrella to cover a number of projects we work with regularly including RDKit, NWChem, MSTK, and 3Dmol.js – check out our ideas page. We should hear back soon about whether we have been accepted as a mentoring organization, and if so we would love to hear from students. My journey into open source and chemistry began with a Google Summer of Code project, and I hope we can offer interesting projects in this areas to more students.

We are working hard to get features completed, and integrated, for the Tomviz project. We are excited about new data being measured where 23,000 individual atom locations and identity have been identified experimentally. This represents a major milestone in materials science where precise 3D locations of atoms can be determined experimentally, and the same systems can also be simulated. New projects that will be announced soon will be developing more open source code to help in storing, sharing, and analyzing data of this nature.

2017 promises to be an exciting year for Open Chemistry, and we look forward to working with our collaborators in these areas!