Collecting reaction incident information: Engaging the community in sharing safety learnings

Every day unexpected incidents happen in the laboratory and each such incident provides experience that supports the learning process. The basic premise of the Chemical Safety Library (CSL) project, undertaken by the Pistoia Alliance, is that these learnings should be shared with the wider community so that everyone who works in a lab has an opportunity to learn from those unexpected reaction outcomes. In this paper, we will discuss the importance of community sharing to promote safety, the conceptualization and implementation of the CSL project, the results since the launch of the CSL service, next steps, and some thoughts on how this data collection could be leveraged in the future.