In his blog, in which he was commenting on the assignment of CCDC number 900000 in the October of 2012, my colleague, Dr Seth Wiggin asked us a question: Who wants to be a millionaire? That was many years ago and since then we have not only issued CCDC number 1000000 for the deposited data but in June 2019 we added the millionth structure into the CSD.
The CCDC’s journey to one million published structures was remarkable and exhausting. In the months leading up to this milestone, we observed a big peak in the depositions of data as CSD Communications. So, we realised that the answer to the question Seth was asking was simple: everybody. Everybody wanted to be the one whose structure would be the millionth one. But where did this increase in data come from?