Celera Genomics made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling access to its proprietary genome sequence information. But this month, Celera discontinued its database subscription service and made its 30 billion base pairs of genomic data of humans, rats, and mice freely available through GenBank, operated by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information. Some see Celera's decision to exit the sequence business as proof of the adage that information wants to be free, and yet another sign that selling access to data is no longer a viable business model. "The trend is perfectly clear. It would be surprising to find any company setting up a business plan that was based on a subscription database of precompetitive information," says Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and leader of the Human Genome Project, Celera's publicly funded rival in the race to sequence the human genome....Not anxious to see its Chemical Abstracts Service Registry follow in the footsteps of Celera's database, the American Chemical Society (ACS) is aggressively lobbying federal officials to curtail development of PubChem, a free online resource on the biochemical structures and properties of some 650,000 small organic molecules....NIH officials say PubChem will complement, not compete, with the CAS. The data overlap will be minimal, they say, and PubChem will not offer the detailed manual curation that makes the CAS valuable to its subscribers. "It's all about money," Collins fumes. "It's hard to see how this very small effort on the part of NIH could represent a significant threat. I am astonished by their very strong negative reaction, especially for a database that's run by a supposedly scientific society."..."Twelve people at NIH will put 1200 people at ACS out of business? That's absurd," says Stephen Heller, a consultant and expert in numerical databases who has extensive U.S. government experience. "There is minor overlap between PubChem and the CAS Registry, but basically they are two separate things. One is for chemists and the other is for biologists...There are structural changes going on in the dissemination of scientific information because of the Internet and because everything has become computer-readable. It's not the same sort of business it used to be. Either you adjust or you have problems."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/07/2005 04:37:00 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.
