Making the InChI FAIR and sustainable by moving to open-source on GitHub

The InChI (International Chemical Identifier) standard stands as a cornerstone in chemical informatics, facilitating the structure-based identification and exchange of chemical compounds across various platforms and databases. The InChI as unique canonical line notation has made chemical structures searchable in the internet on a broad scale. The largest repositories working with InChIs contain more than 1 billion structures. Central to the functionality of InChI is its codebase, which orchestrates a series of intricate steps to generate unique identifiers for chemical compounds. Up to now these steps were sparsely documented and the InChI algorithm had to be seen as black box. For the new 1.07 release the code has been analyzed and the major steps documented, nearly 3000 code issues like bugs, memory leaks, or Google-fuzz issues have been corrected. New test systems have been implemented that let users directly test the code developments. The move to GitHub has not only made the development more transparent but let external contributors join the further development of the InChI code.