Associated Press, Company says free government information threatens its business, The State, April 15, 2005. Excerpt: 'CAS, formerly known as Chemical Abstracts Service, said the National Institutes of Health's PubChem database copies CAS' registry. It has asked the Bethesda, Md., health organization to change the way it compiles information. While CAS charges a fee for access to its registry, PubChem offers it free, threatening the company and its 1,200 employees, CAS President Robert Massie said. "For me to wake up one morning and find I have to compete with my own government is extraordinary," Massie told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published Friday. The information CAS provides - chemical properties, molecular diagrams, scientific-journal entries - is used by thousands of chemists and other scientists. CAS questions whether the information PubChem compiles violates copyright law. CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, has tracked the field of chemistry since 1907. The CAS registry contains information on 25 million chemicals. Last year, NIH started PubChem to further medical research. Its 850,000 entries link molecular data to biomedical literature, said Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. He said PubChem does not have the same information as the CAS Registry. Gov. Bob Taft said in a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt that PubChem "threatens the very existence of CAS."'
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.
