The Thomson Corporation today announced that its Scientific business unit has acquired privately-held Unleashed Informatics Ltd, a life sciences data management company. Unleashed Informatics is the market leader in bioinformatics data and owns the largest repository of value-added bioinformatics records — a highly significant area for target-based drug discovery....
Unleashed Informatics is highly regarded for its subscription-based stable of public and proprietary biological databases, including:
SMID (Small Molecule Interaction Database) containing over 23 million experimentally observed small molecule interactions
BOND (Biomolecular Object Network Database) data warehouse that combines access to BIND and SMID data with publicly-accessible databases, plus similarity search algorithms
Over 11,000 researchers in more than 3,000 organizations worldwide rely on content, tools and analytics from Unleashed Informatics to advance their life sciences investigations. Thomson will continue to make complimentary versions of BOND and BIND available to Unleashed Open Access registrants....
Comment. BIND was originally developed by Blueprint, a non-profit organization funded by IBM and a handful of Canadian medical institutes, including the U of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. Significant funding came from Canadian taxpayers, for example CDN $29 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and perhaps more from Genome Canada. Bind was OA. In December 2005, Blueprint sold BIND to Unleashed Informatics, which maintained an OA edition and introduced a priced edition. Now Thomson has bought Unleashed Informatics. Thomson promises to "continue to make complimentary versions of BOND and BIND available to Unleashed Open Access registrants" but doesn't say whether it will accept new registrants.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/20/2007 05:02:00 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.
