PubChem will soon include chemical structures from Elsevier's xPharm database. From Elsevier's press release (December 19, 2005):
Elsevier MDL today announced an agreement with the National Institute of Health (NIH) to contribute to the NIH effort to catalog information on the biological properties of small molecules in its freely available PubChem database. Elsevier MDL will enrich the growing PubChem resource for the scientific community by furnishing chemical structures from Elsevier’s xPharm database, giving scientists with an xPharm license the ability to move from biological data in PubChem to more focused pharmacology data in xPharm that is essential to drug research. “Elsevier MDL is pleased to collaborate with the NIH to give commercial, academic and governmental researchers broader access to vital research information,” said Elsevier MDL CEO Lars Barfod. “xPharm provides its licensed customers an ideal set of compounds for medicinal chemists, biologists, pharmacologists and other researchers to determine starting points for pharmacological research. The addition of xPharm chemical structures makes PubChem an even more valuable resource, allowing researchers who have licensed xPharm to link from chemistry and biology data in PubChem to authoritative pharmacology data and associated target and disorder data.”...The contribution of xPharm structures marks the first step in Elsevier MDL’s efforts to support the NIH Roadmap initiative. Elsevier MDL and NIH plan additional collaboration related to the PubChem database in the future.
Comment. Of course, PubChem is OA and xPharm is not. Elsevier is not giving away its priced content, just making life easier for paying customers who want to explore connections between xPharm data and PubChem data. It's removing interoperability barriers, not price barriers. This is a model for the American Chemical Society which, so far, seems unwilling to let PubChem coexist with the ACS' Chemical Abstracts Service.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/19/2005 08:12:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
