Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa have written An Open Statement on the Value of PubChem. Excerpt: 'We write as scientists committed to the sharing of chemical information on the public Internet....We wish to emphasize in the strongest terms the current and future value of the NCBI/NIH's PubChem to the scientific and medical community. (SPARC's recent statement outlines the concerns that PubChem may be closed down or severely restricted). We have been using the molecules in PubChem and promoting their value in research. The substances in PubChem are those critical for research in bioscience and healthcare....Until PubChem, virtually no chemical information was freely available (i.e. without a library or a subscription to an information supplier). It is generally not possible to look up freely the chemical formulae of common drugs, food additives, or materials in the environment. Yet much of this information was first published many decades or centuries ago. PubChem provides a reliable, instant, resource for anyone. As an example of its value, the UK had a recent concern about a red dye in chili powder. From home we were able to use PubChem to find out what the chemical formula of this material is and what its reported toxicity and biological properties are. We know of no other freely available resource that we could have used with confidence....In our laboratories we are using PubChem for systematic research and are enhancing its value by publishing the results to the world. We have systematically computed the properties of over 200,000 molecules and published our peer-reviewed results freely . These properties are typical of those used in computer-aided drug discovery or the prediction of the safety of compounds. We have automated the process so that eventually all molecules in PubChem will have this information. Using InChI we have recently created a web site so that anyone can use search engines (e.g. Google(TM) or MSN(TM)) on this database without prior chemical knowledge. This is typical of the way in which information-driven science builds on, and enhances, existing knowledge. Even now it is very difficult for many bioscientists to read papers which include chemical names. We have therefore recently urged that scientific publishers should link their electronic publications to PubChem to help the reader understand the chemistry. Since PubChem also provides important biological background to many entries it enhances the scientific process, speeding it up and reducing the chance of error. We see PubChem as a universal tool for authors, helping them to reduce the chance of mistakes.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/30/2005 02:16:00 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.
