Our “workspace” collaborative platform (wiki)  is based on Atlassian‘s collaborative platform – Confluence. As a research led university, it would be great to add plugins and features to Confluence that are relevant to academic research. At Science Hack Day, earlier in the year, our own Shaun Hare created Ref-Watcher – a Scopus api based citation alerter – plugin for Confluence. This got me thinking about what else we can provide for the research community.

I’m sure that there are some great ideas out there for research based plugins for Confluence. As I have a background in Chemistry and an interest in pharmaceuticals, my initial stab at this was a pure HTML canvas 3D molecular structure viewer. It’s based on the excellent CanvasMol and only works on modern browsers – that’s Firefox 3+, Opera 9+, Safari 4+, Chrome and Internet Explorer 9+ to me and you.

Here’s an online demo and a screenshot:

I’ve since released Molecules plugin for Confluence on Atlassian’s Plugin Exchange. This means other institutions can easily install it on their confluence platform too.

The above post was written while working at the University of Nottingham. It was originally posted here.