The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has issued a public statement in support of PubChem. Excerpt: '[The AAMC] statement of September 30, 2003 applauding NIH Director Elias Zerhouni's Roadmap initiative,...noted that 'perhaps the most exciting component of the [Roadmap] plan are those proposals promoting the development of new research tools, ranging from libraries of chemical structures, small bioactive molecules, and imaging probes, all of which are to be made 'freely accessible' to the research community. NIH is now moving apace to construct these 'molecular libraries' and related resources that will provide biomedical researchers with new tools to study the functions of genes, biochemical pathways, and cells. 'PubChem' is the database component of the molecular libraries initiative, integrating output from the small molecule screening centers with other publicly available data sources, such as NIH's protein structure resources and the biomedical citation literature in PubMed central. Like other facets of the Roadmap, the molecular libraries and PubChem were conceived after extensive consultation with hundreds of experts from the scientific community. NIH assures that these resources are not intended to duplicate or supplant established, commercially available resources. Rather, they are designed to leverage capabilities unique to NIH to develop resources that academic investigators or institutions would not be able acquire on their own, and are similar in many respects to GenBank and PubMed Central, both or which provide public access without onerous financial, reach-through, or other restrictions. Based on the great potential of these resources to advance medical understanding and strengthen the public's health, the AAMC reaffirms its strong support for NIH's Molecular Libraries initiative, including the PubChem database.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/30/2005 04:09:00 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.
