High Quality Science requires High Quality Data! Today, more than ever, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is critical in ensuring that researchers, educators, and students have the highest quality data for chemical compounds and physical particles. Available both in print and online, the CRC Handbook covers 390 chemistry, physics, and related subjects organized in easy-to-find, well-organized tables. Every year, new reported data and new scientific areas are added, making the CRC Handbook the largest comprehensive physical science data source available anywhere. The CRC Handbook features include:
- All data reviewed and evaluated by subject matter experts
- Standardized chemical names, structures, property names, and property units
- Important information on subjects such as chemical and laboratory safety and nomenclature
- Chemical and physical data critical for fields such as environmental science, bio-medical chemistry, organic and inorganic chemistry, materials innovation, geo- and astrophysics, and solid-state science
- Digital tools in our Online Edition to analyze, graph, process, and exploit our data content
Ms. Leah McEwen is an active leader in the professional chemical information community. She has supported research and learning communities in chemistry and related fields at Cornell University where she was the Chemistry Library for over 26 years. She has also served in numerous roles and leadership positions in the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the Research Data Alliance (RDA). She has extensive experience in preparation and management of scientific research outputs and an appreciation of the value and requirements for accurate documentation and metadata necessary to identify, access and reuse data. She is familiar with information workflows and needs across a range of scientific fields in diverse sectors.
Ms. McEwen is internationally recognized for connecting people around common information challenges in digital data and scientific communication. She has organized dozens of topical symposia, workshops and collaborations with researchers, educators, policymakers, funders, publishers, software developers, scientific societies, federal agencies, government labs, industry groups, private institutes, and global organizations worldwide. She has collaborated with many institutes and initiatives on developing workflows and services for managing scientific data, including the International Science Council Committee on Data (CODATA), the Commission for Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights (CIAAW), the Beilstein-Institut, the Pistoia Alliance of pharmaceutical companies, the US National Center for Biotechnology Information, European Bioinformatics Institute, and several national level research data infrastructure initiatives.
Ms. McEwen has been mobilizing the chemical information community around the development of chemical data standards for over a decade. She is an active contributor to many digital standards projects and initiatives, including the International Chemical Identifier (InChI), the Gold Book Compendium of Chemical Terminology, the IUPAC critical evaluation of data program, and the WorldFAIR data reproducibility initiative. She had contributed to guidance and instruction materials on chemical data standards and standardized data reporting and evaluation that are accessed worldwide. She has also been involved in several initiatives to promote chemical safety and the use of chemical data for assessing and managing risk in academic research and teaching laboratories. She is a codeveloper and curator of the Laboratory Chemical Safety Summary data stream from the PubChem database at the NIH to facilitate public access to authoritative chemical safety data.
