ChemDraw + Signals Notebook


The College of Chemistry pays for a site license for ChemDraw (desktop or cloud) and Signals Notebook (an e-notebook).

Major changes in Chemdraw access in 2024!


Key Points:

  • Before 2024, people with a berkeley.edu address could directly request ChemDraw from Perkin Elmer or Revvity Signals.

  • Now, each person has to be manually added by someone in the College of Chemistry to a Berkeley specific Revvity Signals/ChemDraw license portal.

  • There is no CoC IT staff so the MGCF staff will try to manage this even though this is outside the scope of our recharge facility role.

  • There are approximately 1000 Chemdraw users so the MGCF is doing bulk adding of research groups and classes, and delegating authority to others in CoC to help add and manage users. As of December 2024, we have already ported ~900 people.

  • If you are in a CoC research group, we are onboarding research groups in bulk. Please coordinate with your group and email us a csv file with the format:
    Firstname, Lastname, @berkeley.edu email address
    Make sure the Firstname, Lastname, email are comma separated fields. And don't forget to include to PI or any admin person who uses ChemDraw.

    Once we get the csv, we will enable Chemdraw for everyone in the group. We will NOT enable Signals Notebook automatically. If your group wants Signals Notebook, please specifically request this.
    You may also be enrolled in classes, but once we have added you as a researcher, your access will be active till graduation and your class status will not affect that.

  • Further, each CoC research group or other cohesive unit should designate a group representative who can be empowered by MGCF staff to act as an adminstrator and make changes to the group users in the license portal. The MGCF will do the intial bulk upload and then the group admin can make any additions, deletions etc as needed throughout the year.

    Email us to nominate or volunteer to be a group admin.
    See the List of Group admins (visible only to authenticated berkeley.edu users).

  • If you are a student enrolled in Chem 113, 114/214, 115, 252, 260, 261 or 301C, or you are a first year (2024) CoC graduate student, you do not need to request ChemDraw access. This will be automatically set up for you at the beginning of the semester. ChemDraw for CoC graduate students will expire at graduation. Others may expire once classes end, depending on when we need to recover licenses for use by new students (we are limited to 1500 licensed users total). But if you were otherwise added to the portal as part of a research group (see above), your access will be active till graduation and your class status will not affect that.

  • If you are instructor for other classes, please discuss with Terry Chang. We have a limited number of licenses so instructors should justify ChemDraw need. If appropriate, he can add your class to the portal for ChemDraw.
    He will need a csv file with the format:
    Firstname, Lastname, @berkeley.edu email address
    where Firstname, Lastname, email are comma separated fields.
    Because we have a limited number of licenses, we cannot automatically enable large classes. We will prioritize CoC researchers, approved CoC classes, and we will accommodate others if we can. If you have a large class and only a few people need ChemDraw, please only request access for that subset. For classes, we assume only Chemdraw is required, not Signals Notebook.
  • If you are a student needing ChemDraw for a class not listed above, please communicate with your instructor and Terry Chang to request access.

    Other people not fitting in one of the above categories should fill out this form to start the process. But please note that our first effort upon seeing your entry is to try to "group" you in some way. Adding people one by one is inefficient and we are trying to do this in bulk.

  • You will automatically get an email when we have added you to the license portal.
  • Once you are added to the license portal you can login here.
  • If you used Signals Notebook Individual prior to 2024, you have to manually migrate your files to the new SN portal. SN Individual Edition and ChemDraw Cloud will reach End of Life on March 1st, 2025 and all data in that site will be permanently deleted.
    Discuss with your group admin and/or see here: Signals Notebook migration to move your data to the new portal.
  • To contact Revvity support, please go to: https://support.revvitysignals.com/hc/en-us

If you have further questions, email us.

Please include:
1) Your full name. Are you grad/undergrad/postdoc/staff/faculty? What is your department (Chemistry, MCB etc)? Support is very limited, especially for non College of Chemistry people.
2) Are there error messages? Include the exact text or a screen shot.
2) Specify the urls etc that you are using.


See the MGCF for more software.