Eric Wills, American Chemical Society Lobbies Against a Free NIH Database That It Sees as a Competitor, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 'A bitter squabble over [PubChem's] alleged duplication [of the ACS's Chemical Abstracts Service or CAS] has intensified in recent weeks, as Congress considers whether to cut money appropriated for PubChem. The possibility of such a cut alarms many scientists, who see PubChem as a valuable new resource....PubChem was created by putting into a central database publicly available data from academic institutions and government entities like the NIH and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Recently, some public companies have also donated data....Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH...likens the overlap between PubChem and the chemical society's database to that of textbooks sharing an index....Other scientists think a bit of rivalry is not such a bad thing. Christopher A. Reed, a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of California at Riverside and a member of the [ACS], said, "A little healthy competition would probably do [the society] good."...Also hovering over the PubChem debate is the larger issue of whether the government should publish data that are not the result of its own research. Ms. [Madeleine] Jacobs [Executive Director of the ACS] wonders about the ominous consequences if the NIH "should...be the funder, creator, developer, disseminator, and archivist of all literature and databases." Dr. Collins said the scope of that question is too broad. "Precompetitive data, data of fundamental significance that doesn't justify strong intellectual-property protection or secrecy, this is data that wants to be public," he said. Scientists have reached a "pretty strong" consensus about this issue, he said. That government support for PubChem is under debate at all has angered some scientists, including Richard J. Roberts, a 1993 Nobel laureate in medicine. He recently pulled out of a conference sponsored by the chemistry society to protest its stance on PubChem. "Most databases benefit from government subsidies at one point or another," he said. Indeed, grants from the National Science Foundation helped start the society's database of chemical abstracts. "We live in a society that values openness, values transparency," he said. "I think the biologists...have done a much better job of promulgating those core values of society as a whole than have the chemists."...Thus far, the lobbying against PubChem has had little tangible effect. When budget writers in the U.S. House of Representatives released a draft this month of the NIH's appropriations bill for 2006, they decided not to call for a cut in funds for PubChem. Instead, the bill, which is to be considered today by the House Appropriations Committee, encourages the NIH to work with the chemical society to ensure that there would be no "unnecessary duplication or competition."'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/16/2005 10:24:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
