Stephanie Wright, Dueling Databases, TechnoBiblio, June 13, 2005. Excerpt: 'The dialog this issue has generated has been hot and heavy with PubChem supporters explaining that PubChem is complementary to CAS, not duplicative. CAS supporters are complaining of "unfair, improper competition from the government". Aside from the fact that I'm a librarian and believe that information should be free, I think I'm even more rankled as a taxpayer. ACS Chief Executive Officer, Madeleine Jacobs, wrote in a recent letter to Nobel Laureate Richard Roberts: "The fact that the data collected into PubChem is "public domain" is completely irrelevant. Assembling information and publishing it in a variety of forms is what the private sector does. We believe that taxpayers should not fund the entry of NIH into the information industry more broadly than is necessary to disseminate the information whose creation it funds." What this basically says to me is that as a taxpayer, I can pay for the research but if I want access to it, I have to pay the private sector....The logic in this escapes me. Of course, ACS was perfectly happy with government funding of information products when it accepted NSF funds for the development of the CAS Registry System. This issue is about so much more than NIH vs. ACS. It is yet another example of a dangerous trend. Just look at the Department of Energy's now defunct database, PubScience, shut down by the Software and Information Industry Association. If we let a valuable resource like PubChem (as well as other freely accessible databases: ERIC, Agricola, PubMed) get shut down, we might as well give up on the whole open-access venture and we'll only have ourselves as librarians, and taxpayers, to blame.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/13/2005 11:02:00 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.
