Chemistry bots under threat from changes to Twitter’s API rules
Bots that collate papers and provide retrosynthetic analysis could all end if charges are introduce
More than a dozen chemistry bots that rely on Twitter’s application programming interface (API) to function could become defunct if the social media giant follows through on charging for licences to access the software interface. Under the new rules, Twitter will charge a $100 (£83) per month licence fee for continued access to its API.
While newly created tools already have to pay the API licence fee after the new policy was rolled out last week, the rules haven’t as of yet been applied to existing bots, says François-Xavier Coudert, a computational chemist at the French National Center for Scientific Research.