The Association of Academic and Health Science Libraries has publicly released its June 7 letter in support of PubChem. Excerpt: 'I am writing on behalf of the Association of Academic and Health Science Libraries (AAHSL). AAHSL represents 128 libraries located at the nation's academic health centers responsible for training physicians andother health care professionals, providing clinical care, and conducting NIH-funded and other research. We want to express our enthusiastic support fo continuation of PubChem, a chemical database of immense importance to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubChem represents a vital next step for NIH in leveraging its investment in the Human Genome Project, integrating output from the Molecular Libraries Screening Center Netwowrk (MLSCN) and other publicly available data sources, such as NIH's protein structure resources and records of biomedical literature within PubMed and available full-text in the PubMed Central digital archive. PubChem is a powerful tool...that will...lead to medical breakthroughs for clinical treatment of diseases....We believe that [the ACS] concern is unfounded and that the American public is well served by continued development and maintenance of PubChem. By ensuring that publicly financed knowledge is broadly accessible, NIH is enhancing the return on public investment in research and stimulating further innovation by public and private scientific enterprises....It is a mistake to endanger the promise of the [NIH] Roadmap by imposing restrictions on Pubchem that fundamentally undermine its utility. There is simply too much at stake.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/11/2005 12:46:00 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.
