ChemDraw + Signals Notebook


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

There were major changes in Chemdraw access starting summer 2024!


Key Points:

  • Before June 2024, people with a berkeley.edu address could directly request ChemDraw from Perkin Elmer or Revvity Signals. That contract has expired and the old activation process NO LONGER WORKS.

  • Each person now has to be manually added by College of Chemistry staff 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.

  • MGCF staff are adding research groups and classes in bulk, and delegating authority to others in CoC to help add and manage users. We have already ported ~1000 people which is most of the expected user base.

  • If you are in a CoC research group, 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. Do not include any extra characters or white space. The data should be in exactly the format requested because that is required to bulk upload the data in the new portal.
    Don't forget to include the PI or any admin person who uses ChemDraw.

    Once we get the csv, we will enable Chemdraw for listed people.
    We will NOT enable Signals Notebook automatically. If your group wants Signals Notebook, please specifically request this.

    ***** Data in Signals Notebook is tied to the person's status here at Cal. Portal accounts will be deleted after people graduate or leave and all data will become unrecoverable unless moved beforehand. Any group that uses Signals Notebook is responsible for managing their own group's data as people leave. People that don't show up on the current campus personnel list will be purged from the portal, and we are not responsible for user data lost in that process.

  • Each CoC research group or other cohesive unit should designate a group representative to coordinate portal requests with MGCF staff. For large groups, that group representative may 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 additions, deletions etc as needed throughout the year. We are working with Revvity to handle this securely so for now, we are limiting the number of portal adminstartors.

    Email us to nominate or volunteer to be a group coordinator/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 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 and other student researchers 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 users total).

  • 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.
    Terry 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. Any Signals Notebook request must be specifically explained.

  • 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 anyone from a research group or class should first discuss this with the PI or instructor and try to "group" yourself first before using the form.

  • You will automatically get email from Revvity when we have added you to the license portal. Check your Spam folder. The email(s) contains a link to set a password in the portal and those links expire.
  • Once you are added to the license portal you can login here. You can also reset a password by clicking on the ? at that link.
  • If you used Signals Notebook Individual in the past, 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.