Interview with WikiChem's Martin Walker

This month's Reactive Chemist is Martin Walker of the State University of New York College at Potsdam. Walker, like myself is a native of the north-east of England. Read my interview to find out why he left, what made him stay in the US and why he thinks chemists will never do without conferences. He also revealed why he is so keen to make the chemistry portal within Wikipedia work for the global chemical community: "At present, there is an unbelievable amount of chemical information out there, but most of this is inaccessible from a general web search without paying money. I found my students using web searches as a principle method for finding information, but there is limited free information on the web. There are some very useful sites like organic-chemistry.org and webelements.com, but material on these sites still carries copyright restrictions," he said. We also touched on the "negative" publicity that Wikipedia as a whole has received recently.

Check out the latest issue of the chemistry magazine, Reactive Reports to read my full interview with Prof Walker.