Emma Marris, Chemistry society goes head to head with NIH in fight over public database, Nature, June 9, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 'Many chemists might not know it, but the organization that represents them in the United States is fighting to limit their free access to chemical information. The American Chemical Society says that a new publicly funded database of molecules threatens its own fee-based Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), and it is lobbying politicians to restrict the free version. But it is having trouble convincing members that this is in their interests....PubChem, a free database launched by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) last September, threatens CAS's monopoly. It is smaller, containing 650,000 molecules so far compared with CAS's 25 million. And it is aimed more at biologists, linking to information such as gene sequences, and related papers in the NIH's PubMed archive of biomedical journals....But it is growing. On 25 May, records were added from NMRShiftDB, a database of chemicals' nuclear magnetic resonance spectra, and from Nature Chemical Biology, which requires all authors to submit their data to PubChem. Other sources are likely to follow....To try to limit PubChem to information produced by NIH researchers, the ACS has been working with lawmakers in Ohio, where CAS employs almost 1,300 people. In particular, it has lobbied congressman Ralph Regula (Republican, Ohio), the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that allocates money to the NIH. The society's efforts have intensified ahead of this week's expected debut of the 2006 House Appropriations bill that outlines the agency's proposed budget. As Nature went to press, the draft bill was due on 9 June. An official report accompanying the bill was expected to ask the NIH to limit PubChem to data produced by its own efforts. The report is not legally binding, but if the bill is passed it would be difficult for the NIH to ignore...."Most of the [ACS] members I've spoken to are kind of upset about [the ACS position]," says [Chris] Reed [a chemist at the University of California at Riverside]. He is drafting a letter to Chemical & Engineering News, an ACS publication, to complain about the society's actions....The University of California is disseminating information on the quarrel to its chemists, along with suggestions for action, and Regula's phone number. Meanwhile, a group of European chemists, including Peter Murray Rust of the University of Cambridge, UK, is taking a different approach. Worried that researchers elsewhere would lose out if information is removed from the NIH site, they are discussing setting up a European-funded mirror of the site with PubChem, which the US government would have no power to restrict.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/10/2005 01:14:00 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.
