Carl Salter, James B Foresman, J R Schmidt, William F Polik
Computation has become an essential tool for understanding and predicting chemical phenomena. However significant access, cost, and technical barriers limited its widespread use in education and research. WebMO is a web-based interface to most popular computational chemistry programs that allows chemistry students, faculty, and researchers to perform calculations and visualize the results using only the web browser on their computer. This lowering of technical and cost barriers has extended access to state-of-the-art computational chemistry throughout educational and research communities. An ACS Symposium invited a broad range of speakers to share their experiences using WebMO to teach chemical concepts, explain experimental results, and enable research projects. The use of WebMO as platform to collaborate in developing and sharing educational and research experiences was discussed. Interconnectivity with other software tools and future directions of WebMO were also explored. This Viewpoint article summarizes the perspectives of 19 speakers on how WebMO has influenced the delivery of computational chemistry within the chemistry community over the past 25 years and offers ideas for future directions.