RGRP, Government-funded Free Information for Chemists 'Unfair' Competition for Private Monopolies, Digital Rights Network, May 10, 2005. Excerpt: 'Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a subsidiary of the American Chemical Society (founded 1909), is unhappy because the Federal Government has funded an open scientific database called PubChem that *might* compete with their service. CAS President Massie stated: It would not only injure us significantly, it would put information for free in the hands of world scientists and do it all with taxpayer money. For me to wake up one morning and find I have to compete with my own government is extraordinary. (The fact that much of the money paying for subscriptions to the CAS come from taxpayer-funded scientists seems to have passed him by). While CAS just contains 'facts' which, at least under US law, don't yet have protection this hasn't prevented ominous talk about copyright and whether the government is overstepping its bounds in its provision of free information to scientists. Perhaps sensing their weak legal position CAS has taken its concerns direct to politicians. For example Ohio Governor Bob Taft has been persuaded to write a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt stating that PubChem threatens the very existence of CAS....This whole situation is rather ironic given that the ACS was orginally a learned society. However with a chief executive on over a $1 million a year it now appears to be more of a publishing conglomerate, jealously guarding its IP rights and more than happy to thwart access to knowledge and the progress of science if it harms their bottom line. (Readers might recall that the ACS also recently threatened action against Google over the use of the term scholar in google scholar project claiming this infringed on their product called Scifinder Scholar).'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/19/2005 01:12:00 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.
