Once upon a time, a group of bright-eyed chemistry students were introduced to the mines of chemical literature, a huge and ever-growing ore which mainly resided in nicely bound learned journals and reference works. They learned, if they were lucky, how to mine and use this wonderful resource in the course of their education and future career endeavors. However, this amazing resource became less and less readily available to more and more chemists as it involved actually going into a chemistry library and cracking open those tomes of Chemical Abstracts, Beilstein's Handbuch, and the like. Gray-beard mentors recounted how, in the good old days, a subscription to Chemical Abstracts was included in one's membership in that guild of chemists, the American Chemical Society (ACS). Now, access to the mines was being restricted by increased costs and decreased accessibility.
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