WAKEFIELD, Mass., Feb. 27, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Outercurve Foundation has partnered with iChemLabs to integrate iChemLab's open source ChemDoodle Web components with Chem4Word 1.5, a new release. It is available for download as a beta, enables users to intuitively draw 2D molecules from scratch.

Chem4Word student and researcher users will benefit by having access to ChemDoodle, the standard in chemical drawing, from within Microsoft Word. Chem4Word's interface is made easier and more informative by the Web components, which can immediately recognize chemical structures. Chem4Word Documents are portable, sharable, and can be read on any machine.

"ChemDoodle was a great fit for providing users with a more versatile set of chemical authoring options in Chem4Word, and the rich API support made it easy for us to integrate," said Alex Wade, a Chem4Word project leader and Director of Scholarly Communication for Microsoft Research. "We look forward to working with iChemLabs to simplify the ways that people can more easily integrate their chemistry content into Word."

"The Chem4Word project is a great example of how open source projects can benefit the chemistry community," said Kevin Theisen, President, iChemLabs. "We are proud to partner with and enhance the Chem4Word project with the ChemDoodle Web Components. ChemDoodle is used in over 80 countries and users will now find a familiar and powerful interface in the Chem4Word project."

Microsoft Research and Drs. Peter Murray-Rust and Joe Townsend of the University of Cambridge's Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics initially developed the open source Chem4Word project. The two organizations assigned the project to the Outercurve Foundation in February 2011.

About The Outercurve Foundation
The Outercurve Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects. For more information on the Outercurve Foundation, please visit: http://outercurve.org

About iChemLabs
iChemLabs, LLC. is a scientific software company excelling in cheminformatics algorithms, visualization and graphics, and groundbreaking technologies such as HTML5/Canvas/WebGL. iChemLabs provides expertise in desktop, mobile and web based technologies for both consulting and custom development. http://www.ichemlabs.com

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SOURCE Outercurve Foundation