According to the Open Access News:
“The American Chemical Society is calling on Congress to shut down the NIH’s PubChem, a freely accessible database on small organic molecules. PubChem is an important component of NIH’s Molecular Libraries Initiative, which is a key element of the NIH “road map” for medical research. ACS claims that PubChem competes with Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). In reality, PubChem and the Chemical Abstracts Service databases are complementary, not duplicative.”
Patrice McDermott has written an excellant overview of the issues.
How many of these excellant services are going to be lost or sold off to the private sector before people catch on? PubScience, Eric, now PubChem. Agricola? National Weather Service? OUR government information systems are being sold off or shut down because of bogus competition claims. And this isn’t a recent phenomena. See The Scientist, November 20, 2002.
[Thanks once again Peter Suber!]
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First they came for PubScience, but I didn’t care because I wasn’t interested in engineering.
Then they came for PubChem, but I didn’t complain because I didn’t care about biochemistry.
Then they came for PubMed, but I didn’t worry because everything’s on the web right?
Then they came for THOMAS, but who reads bills?
Then they told me it would be $50 to know tomorrow’s weather forecast.
Thanks for the great post. This is an illustration of how if we care about ANY gov’t info products, we need to speak up when any are threatened. Or we’ll be faced with a permanent future of double-billing. Our tax dollars will continue be extracted to produce data, and then we’ll have to buy it back.
We paid for that data, it should be ours.
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“And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them.” — Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the origina