First introduced in 2002 by Peter Murray-Rust and his colleagues in the chemistry department at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, WWMM provided a free, easily searchable database for information about thousands of complicated molecules, data that would otherwise remain inaccessible to scientists.
Murray-Rust, a chemical informatics specialist, has estimated that 80% of the results produced by chemists around the world is never published in scientific journals.
In a presentation at the "CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications (OAI4)", Murray-Rust said that chemistry actually leads other fields in published data.
In his CERN presentation, Murray-Rust stated that the WWMM was a "response to the expense of [scientific] journals", and he asked the rhetorical question, "Can we win the war to make data open, or will it be absorbed into the publishing and pseudo-publishing world?"
Murray-Rust and his colleagues are also responsible for the development of the Chemical Mark-up Language (CML), a variant of XML intended for chemists.