After several months of discussions between the two organizations - and the involvement of the US House of Representatives and Senate, both of which addressed the issue as part of their 2006 federal appropriations recommendations - ACS in early August offered to develop and support a freely available database that would include data from NIH screening centers as well as other compounds with associated bioassay data. ACS pledged $10 million and 15 staff members over five years to support the project. NIH rejected the offer, however. In an Aug. 22 letter to ACS President William Carroll, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni said that his staff gave the "generous" proposal "very serious consideration," but ultimately determined that the "most critical aspects of PubChem would be lost in such a model."...In a move to put the squabble to rest, Zerhouni proposed a six-part "alternative structure" that includes a collaboration between CAS and NIH to assign registry numbers for PubChem structures and a promise that PubChem "will not disseminate information on chemical reactions, measured properties, methods, patents and applications, markush structures, or conference information." A key component of the proposal - and one that NIH has already taken steps to implement - is the creation of a working group comprising private-sector participants that will advise NCBI on issues of interest to commercial providers of chemical information....On Sept. 1, NIH issued a request for nominations for potential members of the working group, which will advise NCBI on a number of issues, including "avoiding unnecessary duplication with commercial information providers."...NIH continues to stand by its view that PubChem and CAS are "complementary" resources, Berg said. "You can go to the CAS resources to get chemical information, and then go to PubChem to get access to biomedical information. We've been working to try to find ways to work more synergistically with the resources that are out there, including CAS," he said.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/14/2005 08:14:00 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.
