Williams introduced an Open Access journal, the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry, and the development team provided novel online markup technology (ChemMANTIS – Markup And Nomenclature Transformation Integrated System) to allow crowdsourced markup of chemistry related terms linked up, where possible, to the ChemSpider database. Williams is a judge for the Open Notebook Science Challenge. He promotes the use of Open Data, particularly spectral data, publishes in Open Access journals and is an advocate for Open Notebook Science. Williams is an advocate for freeing pre-clinical data from the pharmaceutical industry on the internet. Williams has worked closely with Sean Ekins to advocate the release of pre-competitive pharmaceutical data to the community. He has also participated in the analysis and review of open pharmaceutical data released to the community.
Williams, himself a longtime contributor to Wikipedia has been vocal in questioning the notability requirements of Wikipedia itself,  comparing pornstars and scientists.