David Bradley, Interview with Steve Bryant, Reactive Reports, Issue 53, March 20, 2006. Bryant is a Senior Investigator in the Computational Biology Branch of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH. Excerpt:
[Q] Why do you personally feel PubChem is important?
[A] ...[T]he most valuable thing we can do with computers and molecular databases [is to] make the information as accessible to researchers as we can. There was a whole world of information about the bio activities/properties of small molecules that was not included in our retrieval systems in as good a way as it could have been. I thought it be worthwhile to do as it would have a major impact on research.
[Q] Why shouldn't researchers pay for this information?
[A] ...[I]t is interesting to look back 25 years or so when it became technically possible to use computers to make molecular databases. The biologists made GenBank and Protein Databank as public repositories, but in the chemical world at the same time the same technology was used to create commercial information services. So, there were two models about information access, although why that should be no one can really say. One factor may have been that at that time, biologists didn't think of sequences or proteins as commercial products whereas in chemistry there was a long history of paying for information about molecules because there were obvious commercial opportunities. When it comes to molecular libraries, the decision of Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH, and colleagues was to follow the biological model of the Human Genome Project and GenBank and to make the information freely available....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/20/2006 03:29:00 PM.
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.
