The NIH has given the Scripps Research Institute and eight other research centers an $80 million grant to create a biochemical research network. All the resulting data will be OA on PubChem. The San Diego Union-Tribune published details today:
The Scripps Research Institute has been awarded more than $80 million – its largest grant ever – to be a research hub in a federally funded network that will ferret out new targets in the body that play a key role in disease.
The goal of the network funded by the National Institutes of Health is to show how these targets could be receptive to a drug, perhaps turning off the progression or symptoms of a disease. Ultimately, the NIH wants to lay the groundwork for new treatments for rare diseases....
The grant is a significant sum when NIH funding for individual researchers has stagnated. Scripps won the funding after proving itself in a three-year pilot project with the NIH....
Scripps is one of four comprehensive research centers funded for the project. Together with five smaller specialized centers, they make up the Molecular Libraries Production Centers Network. The NIH did not name the other centers.
The results of the network's research will be posted in a PubChem, a public Internet database open to academic researchers and drug-discovery companies....
The grants enabling the network are the NIH's biggest investment to date in its Roadmap Initiative, whose goal is to eliminate roadblocks slowing biomedical research....
In addition to the grants supporting the research centers in the network, the NIH is issuing grants to individual investigators to support their basic research on new targets....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/02/2008 09:14:00 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.
The goal of the network funded by the National Institutes of Health is to show how these targets could be receptive to a drug, perhaps turning off the progression or symptoms of a disease. Ultimately, the NIH wants to lay the groundwork for new treatments for rare diseases.... 
