Mark Leggott, American Chemical Society vs. Open Access to Research, Loomware, May 20. 2005. A blog posting. Excerpt: 'I've been wondering when this behemoth was going to role over and notice that the academic world was starting to freely share research information. ACS has long been the publisher of a very powerful and unique database of research in the area of chemistry and related disciplines. There is a wealth of information in the SciFinder Scholar system, but unfortunately, it remains out of reach for many academic institutions as it is simply too expensive. The University of Winnipeg was only able to subscribe to this system in the last year via a new pricing model for undergraduate institutions. Before that our chemists had to go to another larger institution to do research - an act that was itself frowned upon. This product, more than any other, has long symbolized the problems with our current academic information environment. It is the music industry of the academic world - crying wolf because they have failed to adapt to a knowledge industry that passed it by decades ago....ACS has locked up the worlds chemical metadata for far too long and they just don't get it. Fortunately, that problem has been slowly righting itself with the development of even more advanced web tools as well as better access to scholarly information via systems like Google Scholar (you may remember ACS's earlier attempts to get Google to stop using the word Scholar...give me a break). A good example is the National Institute for Health's PubChem database, which provides free access to a good subset of information about organic molecules and their biological impact. Just think: for the first time ever, students and scientists have free and unfettered access to information that can help make new discoveries....ACS has started rallying the government troops in the U.S., claiming that this terrible product provides information to scientists for free using, gasp...stutter, public funds! Surely this cannot be allowed!...Surely someone in the government will realize that this steals directly from ACS's coffers - lovingly filled by academic libraries that subscribe to their expensive, SciFinder Scholar database? Surely someone will understand that these publicly funded institutions can't be allowed to redirect money from ACS's coffers to other needs? Our universities and struggling students must continue...Oops - I think I just let the cat out of the bag! ACS gets most of their money from taxpayers too!'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/21/2005 10:00:00 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.
