Susan Morrisey, Database Debate, Chemical and Engineering News, April 25, 2005. Excerpt: 'When NIH rolled out its publicly available chemical structure database last fall, officials at the American Chemical Society saw a product that they say looks a lot like a database of its own--the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) Registry. ACS officials are worried about the consequences of a free government service competing with an established private-sector business. The NIH database, known as PubChem, is a key piece of the Molecular Libraries & Imaging component of the agency's Roadmap for Medical Research. PubChem is designed to integrate chemical information on compounds produced by NIH's molecular libraries screening centers with other databases supported by the National Library of Medicine. Like the CAS Registry, PubChem provides chemical structures and links to literature references. PubChem is supposed to focus on connecting chemical information on small organic molecules that have potential use in drug development with biomedical research. "We think this an unwise use of taxpayer money that should be used for research, and it is direct and unfair competition with the CAS Registry, a valuable database that ACS built up over the years with its own funding and decades of intellectual curation of data." Robert J. Massie, president of CAS, agrees that PubChem has overstepped its function. "NIH is going beyond its stated purposes and is creating a replica service to the CAS Registry," he comments. "If NIH would limit itself to publishing NIH-funded information, this controversy would disappear immediately."...NIH, on the other hand, views PubChem as complementary to the CAS Registry. National Institute of General Medical Sciences Director Jeremy Berg explains that PubChem is duplicative only in the sense that both databases are indexes of compounds...."The links from PubChem are to data that are already publicly available--for example, the National Cancer Institute screening data, data that will come from the roadmap," and other links to the biomedical literature, Berg says. "What CAS covers is links to things like chemical literature, patent literature, and reactions."'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/25/2005 10:40:00 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.
