Open Access News

U.S. government officials and a scientific society are batting ideas back and forth on how to keep a new [open-access] federal chemical database from overlapping with an existing [toll-access] private one. So far, they are still searching for common ground....In early August, ACS president William Carroll made NIH an offer: The society would donate $10 million and up to 15 staff members over 5 years to build NIH a free database of chemicals with attached bioassay data. NIH expressed many concerns about the proposal, however, in a four-page letter to Carroll from NIH Director Elias Zerhouni. In the 22 August letter, Zerhouni notes that NIH wants to integrate PubChem with other public biomedical databases, which NCBI staff --not a chemistry organization-- "are in an ideal and unique position" to do. NIH is also concerned about which molecules ACS would include, arguing that the database cannot be limited to compounds with biological data because such bioactivity may remain to be discovered. In addition, Zerhouni explains, the plan would violate federal rules requiring that any such agreement be open to bidding from other companies. Zerhouni offered a six-part "alternative structure" that would avoid overlap between PubChem and CAS but strengthen the ties between the two databases. Among those changes, NIH would pay ACS to make sure PubChem entries contain the same numbers that CAS uses to register each molecule to "maximize the interactiveness" of the two databases. NIH would agree not to include nonbiomedical information that CAS now offers, such as chemical reactions and patents....The letter says NIH is open to developing a "retrospective process" for removing chemicals from PubChem that are deemed of no use for biomedical research. NIH officials have noted in the past that it would be very hard to rule out any chemicals. For example, ACS initially claimed that an explosive called HDX should not be included in PubChem, but an NCBI official pointed out that the National Cancer Institute has found that HDX has activity in antitumor assays. Both sides say they are committed to finding a compromise.