The Open Force Field Consortium Advisory Board met on 20 February, 2019. The minutes are summarized as follows:

• Next release of toolkit currently being tested and finished
• Workflow documentation
  • Next item on to-do list
  • Call for additional desired workflows to be posted in #documentation channel
• Industry compound additions to parameterization sets
  • Starting small – current focus is finding parameters in need of optimization by looking for discrepancies between current forcefields when minimizing structures
    • Industry partners should identify particularly high priority chemical space for initial parameterization
    • Compounds/fragments to be sent via Slack or GitHub
  • BI has SureChembl dump and scripts that may be able to be shared. We will follow up asynchronously.
  • NN potential parameterization not in scope for SMIRNOFF at this stage, but considering using ANI-1 or similar for bespoke torsion fitting tool in addition to QM calculations.
  • Industry partners to provide SMILES of fragments and/or public molecules. No PDFs please.
• Letter of support for NIH grant proposal needed by March 1st at latest
• Call for all industry partners that are able to be listed on website as such (openforcefield.org/consortium) to contact David Mobley if not already listed.
• Hiring update
  • Candidates being interviewed for development of bespoke torsion fitting tool
  • Candidates sought for postdoc position at Janssen for in-kind contribution – contact DM if you know of a good candidate.
  • Project manager hired at 50% ( remainder 50% in JC’s lab ) to oversee and coordinate OpenFF efforts.
• Odds and Ends:
  • Investigating potential for porting in protein forcefields in SMIRNOFF format for use with toolkit.
  • Reminder of F2F meeting Aug 30-31st in San Diego following fall ACS
  • Nearly approved governance changes regarding discretionary spending as discussed in last advisory board meeting. Once approved, revised governance board documents to be distributed.