Technology Blog

The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication has created a page on The American Chemical Society and NIH’s PubChem, collecting the position statements, the major documents, and a list of actions that can support PubChem. It’s a good place (along with OAN, of course) to monitor new developments in the unfolding story.

Aliya Sternstein, Chemical publisher goes after NIH, Federal Computer Week, May 27, 2005. Excerpt: ‘Officials at the two organizations [ACS and NIH] have exchanged letters, meetings and phone calls since 2004….NIH officials said they are confused as to why ACS insists PubChem will affect the organization’s business when the two organizations’ missions and audiences are different. “What is in common is a relatively small number of compound structures and names,” said Christopher Austin, senior adviser to the translational research director at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center at the National Human Genome Research Institute. “ACS has gotten hung up on this. They have taken this, frankly, rather disingenuously, to implicate that PubChem duplicates CAS. CAS has 25 million structures. PubChem has about 850,000. PubChem is a subset. Not everything that is in CAS is relevant to biomedical research.”…NIH officials understand that refocusing PubChem will slow medical progress. “It would have profoundly negative effects on this new paradigm of making medical discoveries, right at the time that it is just getting started….Unfettered access to a large number of different types of information is what allows fundamental new discoveries to be made,” Austin said. “To kill this thing when it’s still in the cradle would have a dramatically negative effect on medical discovery.” The rational arguments that NIH has made to ACS have had virtually no effect, he said. “They are fundamentally not understanding that PubChem deals with an entire intellectual area that they know nothing about,” he said. And NIH officials said that many of ACS’ arguments are untrue. “PubChem does not come at the expense of basic research; it empowers basic research,” said Larry Thompson, chief of the Communications and Public Liaison Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute….”Clearly there would be no purpose to establishing a working group to further discuss our fundamental disagreement,” wrote Madeleine Jacobs, executive director of ACS, in her last letter to NIH April 13. ACS has cut off the conversation, in favor of seeking a political solution. Rick Johnson, director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said, unlike ACS, NIH researchers are not hiring chemists to pore through patents to extract chemical names and structures. “They’re taking on something that is not any threat to them and they are precluding an activity that will be key to returning on the NIH investment [in the human genome]…new drugs and better health care,” he said. “What they want to do is neuter [PubChem] so it’s useless to anyone. It’s all about protecting the CAS franchise, not about what’s best for biomedicine,” Johnson added.’