Miriam Drake, A Cauldron Bubbles: PubChem and the American Chemical Society, Information Today, June 6, 2005. Excerpt: 'A freely accessible public database of chemical information, produced by a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), is at the center of a controversy over publicly subsidized data competing with commercial information providers. The American Chemical Society (ACS), said to be the largest scientific society in the world, has voiced strenuous objections to the creation and availability of PubChem....The American Chemical Society, along with its Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) division, has protested the government creation and support of PubChem and its availability. In a May 23, 2005, press release, ACS stated: "The ACS believes strongly that the Federal Government should not seek to become a taxpayer supported publisher. By collecting, organizing, and disseminating small molecule information whose creation it has not funded and which duplicates CAS services, NIH has started ominously, down the path to unfettered scientific publishing."...The ACS position does not recognize that the U.S. government is a large publisher and is mandated by law to publish a variety of materials as part of agency missions and for the public good....Consultant and ACS member Stephen Heller, a chemist for 35 years, said in an interview that the ACS position is misleading. He believes that there is about a 3 percent overlap between PubChem and CAS and that the taxpayer-funded activity makes sense because the database and its growth will come from publicly funded resources. [Henry] Rzepa, professor of chemistry at Imperial College, U.K. and Peter Murray-Rust, reader in molecular informatics at University of Cambridge, U.K., said in an open statement: "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...We have been using the molecules in PubChem and promoting their value in research...Until PubChem virtually no chemical information was freely available."...The extent of the overlap between PubChem and CAS is one issue. NIH staff analysis shows relatively little overlap. ACS claims there is more than a small amount of overlap. The two sources differ widely in size, scope, and resources....ACS spokespeople believe that PubChem will put it out of business. Others disagree and see PubChem and CAS as complementary—not competitive....The issue likely will be decided in Congress. ACS is working with the governor of Ohio, Robert Taft, and Ralph Regula, R-Ohio. (CAS is based in Columbus, Ohio.) The appeal does not relate to making biomedical information available. ACS is claiming that PubChem will put CAS out of business, resulting in the loss of 1,300 jobs in Columbus. It is doubtful that members of Congress will understand the nature of the issues; it is likely that they will pass some sort of legislation removing PubChem from public access.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/06/2005 02:48:00 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.
