Open Access News

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is the world’s largest scientific society....The society owes most of its wealth to its two ‘information services’ divisions — the publications arm and the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a rich database of chemical information and literature. Together, in 2004, these divisions made about $340 million — 82% of the society’s revenue — and accounted for $300 million (74%) of its expenditure....Although the ACS is a non-profit organization, the information-services divisions are increasingly being run like businesses. Any net revenue is naturally fed back into the society’s other activities, but the business-like attitude is making some ACS members uneasy. A small but vocal group of critics fears that business priorities are supplanting the goal laid out in the society’s charter: “to encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner the advancement of chemistry and all its branches”....An ongoing dispute between the ACS and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) reflects some of the problems. The NIH has recently unveiled a freely accessible database called PubChem, which provides information on the biological activity of small molecules. The ACS sees this as unfair competition to the fee-based CAS because it is taxpayer-funded, and the society wants the database restricted to molecules that have been screened by NIH centres. A few ACS members argue that the society is being unduly aggressive in protecting CAS and ought not to be challenging the scope of a database that could be a useful and free resource for chemists. For the record, Nature’s sister journal Nature Chemical Biology links all of its articles to PubChem. “I am growing increasingly upset with their direction,” says Chris Reed, an inorganic chemist at the University of California, Riverside, and one of the more outspoken critics of the ACS. “They have a culture of a for-profit corporation.”...Steve Heller, who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, is part of an e-mail listserver community that is a source of lively discussion on this issue. Heller is a retired chemist and ACS member who also serves on an NIH advisory board on PubChem. “It seems as if those members of the ACS who see and know what is going on — and it is not a very large number — are very upset that the management and staff are taking a position without any consultation with the membership or discussion with experts in the field, and doing things that are not in the interest of their members, who want [PubChem] for free,” he says.