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Open Source Molecules
manganese4 writes "They've been discussed before in relation to Google, but the American Chemical Society has launched a new effort against perceived competitors. They are attempting to limit the government's ability to freely publish the results of scientific work paid for by tax dollars. The British journal Nature and the Univeristy of California reports on efforts by the ACS in attempting to shutdown a free database, PubChem, of molecular structures because it competes head to head with the fee-for-service Chemical Abstract Service. Their rationale is that the government should not spend taxpayer dollars on something private business is already doing. Luckily the government has not backed down."
For instance, private and public health care as well as transportation work very well together.
The owls are not what they seem
Data mining is becoming more and more important for science. But you can't do data mining if the data is locked up and requires cumbersome and costly subscriptions to access.
Chemical, biological, and other scientific databases need to be open, free, and freely redistributable for science and technology to continue to make rapid progress.
Guess we can shut down public schools then, now, eh?
This nonsense has to end.
--
Kunowalls Random sexy wallpapers (some NSFW)
Their rational is that...
That's rationale, you illiterate clod.
I guess your government shouldn't be paying for any of the research either, then, including the research done by graduate and doctoral students. Maybe time to send a bill to every company employing one of those people?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Government shouldn't pay for something that the private sector is already doing. Full stop.
The government's job is to make sure the citizenry is protected against foreign invaders, provide a reasonable level of safety, and provide a forum in which aggrieved parties can have an impartial entity adjudicate issues. In short: Military, Police, and Courts.
It should try to stay out of the way of individuals to the maximum extent possible. Every encroachment it makes results in the diminishment of freedom for its citizens. If we accept that it is the government's job to research medicine, should we also accept that it is the government's job to provide that medicine? Such a system in which we rely on the government to do something automatically puts downward pressure on the current providers of that service. It essentially provides the government with a monopoly over that service.
I'm all for freedom of information. I think that having information available to all is absolutely essential for a free society. However, it is essential that the government stay as far away from that as possible. They should neither encourage nor discourage companies from releasing information. In fact, they should be a completely uninterested party.
To the extent that government funds help jumpstart lagging scientific research, the same amount of freedom is lost. The public money is a double-edged sword, and this time we see what happens when someone tries to directly compete with the government. Typically this is decried as selfish on the part of the company, but is that really true? Would you not have a grievance if the government decided to take away your job? If it were a private company doing this, you would have no argument from me. However because it is the government doing it, and not a private company, I think that it would be more prudent to take the side of the private sector rather than the side of a growing government bureaucracy.
Why do they want to shut down a database that could help them find / verify their own data ?
They could even just dig data out of it and save some energy for value-added work that they could charge for. At least, this is how I saw it work in mechanical engineering.
*squeak*
When Osama Bin Laden will apply for US govt to remove and stop funding the US Army, because private parties (him) own private military groups?
Corporate-owned Police, IRS replaced by Mafia, and of course schools under management of MTV. Go Private Property!
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The whole mess of taxpayer money being used to fund private research, at which point competitors demand access to that research, would be resolved if property rights in the US were respected. The State would cease its protection racket against those living under its control, the State would stop using extorted funds in an attempt to prop up pet interests and buy votes, and there would be no question on the right-to-access information, as it would be justly privately owned.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I'm generally against the idea of the government spending money obtained through illegal, coercive measures (read: taxes) on much of anything. That said, scientific research is probably one of the best uses they can make of the money they steal from us... so as long as they're going to continue stealing our money, I think resources like this should be kept freely available to the public. After all, we **already paid for it.**
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
When will society become outraged at the corporate mindset? The mindset that says that society can not be enriched if it costs the corporation or in this case the "not-for-profit" organization?
It is unfortunate that the only way that society can protect itself is to become and stay fighting mad. I don't want to be angry all of the time but the world is filled with greedy assholes who would turn our world into a hopeless pit of poverty if left unchecked.
Can a Utopian world where even the poorest among us can live comfortably and a corporate world where piggy CEOs can slurp up million dollar salaries coexists? If not, I for one choose Utopia.
So I say to all of the greedy sons-of-bitches "Don't get in the way of a better world. Adapt or die!"
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Just from glancing at the PubChem site, it seems like its main function at the moment is to find journal articles relevant to a given chemical. This is probably what worries the ACS most, as there are already plenty of databases online that provide info about chemical properties (such as the NIST Chemistry Webbook or the Spectral Database Server), they just don't link to journal articles. It would be fairly outrageous for the ACS to complain about these.
At any rate, the ACS's complaints seem pretty silly to me, as I only know of a few systems for finding chem journal articles (CAS, Beilstein and SciFinder Scholar). I would guess they're all horrendously expensive, and only accessible to individuals at university libraries, so a free system like this would certainly be great for the average citizen. Additionally, it may well be worth the government's while, in terms of cost, to develop a free system for their own use.
One option would be to sell this new database to the competitor?
I agree the government should normally keep its hands off, but some things are either just too important or simply don't work well in a capitalist system (for example the police). Im not sure about this particular case, it seems like it probably shouldn't have been created in the first place and now its too late - why did a government department need to create this database if they could have just used the existing one? Although that has its own issues i.e. companies ripping of governments - if there's one un-patriotic thing to do its charging your government through the roof for your products/services, and sadly that's what most big business is about.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Who finds it ironic that Nature charges for access to an article championing free access to information?
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
You believe that it is vital that information be free, but essential that the government not keep it free.
Were you perhaps hoping that the Good Fairy That Lives In The Sky will wave her magic Wand O' Libertarianism and suddenly make commercial organizations want to provide free access to scientific research? Personally, I'd rather that when the public has paid for research to be done it be made available to the public -- even if that does annoy large corporations and Libertarians.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
This type of thinking reminds me of Europe in the Middle Ages. Guilds were then allowed to regulate (read monopolise) all branches of industry and trade, backed by government enforcers. Even the most basic information was "trade secret" and not to be revealed to non guildmembers. The perfect job protection scheme, and one of the reasons that Europe was at that time eclipsed by the Arab world in scientific, medical, and technological achievements. I submit that the Government, in looking after the public interest, has every right to support valuable generation (universities) and dissemination (universities and this online service) of knowledge. And since when did the ACS acquire copyright on basic chemical knowledge?
That being said it is strange that they are so vehemently against an NIH database which is primary geared towards biological compounds (i.e. proteins and nucleic acids and derivatives) which is pretty orthogonal to most of the chemical research world. But it would be a gross oversimplification to paint the ACS as an evil money grubbing organization.
Besides, chemists are rarely evil. Science fiction proves it's always an overweight doctor come-geneticist played by marlon brando that's evil.
Donations from you, me, and whoever else is interested in a publically-accessible and free database of molecule structures, to keep it online forever. Someone to be 'librarian', accepting new ones, accepting revisions which correct defects in old ones.
It's got to be done, and it's got to be free for all to see. Otherwise mistakes will be made.
And when I sequence a protein, or solve its structure, I don't do it for the greater glory of the ACS. I do it for a completely different purpose.
Maybe the US government is the wrong organisation to own and operate it. Not everyone agrees with their policies, and they tend to change every 4 years anyway.
But count me in, if you want a donation.
1. Offer expensive service nobody wants to use
2. Sue government
3. Profit!
that the DB is simply cateloging what was discovered on taxpayer (read as OUR) money. IOW, this is simply trying to get the most for our money. I do not have an issue with that. In fact, I would have more of an issue if they did not.
Keep in mind, that the private sector can do all sorts of interesting things. Manipulate the data so that it is better to access. Or perhaps offer a secure DB with encrypted data where a company who does private research can sell that data, or can buy as needed. There is plenty of space for private enterprise.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
it was the Libertarian POV that prevailed in early America and allowed the USA to excell.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Chemistry society goes head to head with NIH in fight over public database
Emma Marris, Washington DC
Many chemists might not know it, but the organization that represents them in the United States is fighting to limit their free access to chemical information. The American Chemical Society says that a new publicly funded database of molecules threatens its own fee-based Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), and it is lobbying politicians to restrict the free version. But it is having trouble convincing members that this is in their interests.
CAS is part of many chemists' daily routine. The service is a massive registry of chemicals with their structures and properties, as well as links to related publications and patents.
Depending on their size, chemistry departments and companies pay from a few thousand to more than a hundred thousand dollars for a year's access to the database.
Chemists have had no alternative. A journal search will not find a chemical structure, so the database is the only way to find previously reported molecules and reactions, short of wading through papers by hand.
"CAS is very important," says Chris Reed, an inorganic chemist at the University of California, Riverside. "My students use it all the time, for mining the literature or finding the compounds they want."
PubChem, a free database launched by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) last September, threatens CAS's monopoly. It is smaller, containing 650,000 molecules so far compared with CAS's 25 million. And it is aimed more at biologists, linking to information such as gene sequences, and related papers in the NIH's PubMed archive of biomedical journals.
650,000 and rising
But it is growing. On 25 May, records were added from NMRShiftDB, a database of chemicals' nuclear magnetic resonance spectra, and from Nature Chemical Biology, which requires all authors to submit their data to PubChem. Other sources are likely to follow.
The ACS argues that projects that compete with the private sector are a waste of taxpayers' money. The database generates the lion's share of the non-profit ACS's income of $375 million, which pays for the society's publications, meetings and staff.
So the society is trying to persuade Congress to make the NIH restrict its database to molecules found by NIH researchers.
Steve Bryant, project director for PubChem, says that's unfair, because the linked content provided by the two databases is different, and they serve different audiences.
Bob Massie, head of CAS, disagrees. "We have been hearing that every chemical researcher understands that PubChem is a substitute for CAS," he says.
To try to limit PubChem to information produced by NIH researchers, the ACS has been working with lawmakers in Ohio, where CAS employs almost 1,300 people. In particular, it has lobbied congressman Ralph Regula (Republican, Ohio), the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that allocates money to the NIH.
The society's efforts have intensified ahead of this week's expected debut of the 2006 House Appropriations bill that outlines the agency's proposed budget. As Nature went to press, the draft bill was due on 9 June. An official report accompanying the bill was expected to ask the NIH to limit PubChem to data produced by its own efforts. The report is not legally binding, but if the bill is passed it would be difficult for the NIH to ignore.
Although many chemists are unaware of the ACS's attempt to restrict PubChem, weblogs and library discussion groups have picked up the subject. The fight is turning sour. "My only interpretation of the ACS's recent actions is that it is no longer trying to represent the best interests of the scientists who form its membership," says Richard Roberts, a chemist at New England Biolabs in Beverly, Massachusetts, and 1993 Nobel laureate, who advises PubChem. "Rather, it seems to be a commercial enterpri
This time I could be arsed.
"Their rational is that the government should not spend taxpayer dollars on something private business is already doing"
Of course, you can turn this around: private business shouldn't spend its investor's money on something the government is already doing.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Service.java:2: illegal combination of modifiers: public and private
public private void service() {
^
1 error
There is no need for the government to make a redundant database, when someone else is already doing it and selling access at-cost. Even if ACS was trying to make a buck, the argument wouldn't change.
IF the government isn't backing down from this fight, then they should make sure that they do the same in the fight against the National Weather Service Same idea of private vs. public work.
Any profits made from its databases are used to further science, as ACS is a not-profit.
I wish I had modpoints.
Luke-Jr
I think anyone of us would be somewhat pissed if we worked hard to create a successful business, only to be driven out of it by a government subsidized effort which was able to undercut your prices because it received free money from the taxpayers.
That's essentially what these programs are: corporate welfare; taking tax-payer dollars and giving it to some corporate entity (whether it be a non-profit, city or a university) to subsidize some effort.
While I'll be the first to agree that some programs are worth subsidizing (law enforcement and health care being examples), what happens to the argument that free and open markets lead to more efficient practices? When and why doesn't it apply in these cases?
The ACS is a useless organization, and I speak as a practicing chemist of many years. Nothing - and let me repeat this for emphasis - nothing that they have done has ever had any positive impact on my job or career. I toss their monthly letter inviting me to rejoin unopened into the trash. It would be money flushed down the toilet. They could disappear tomorrow, and I would not notice. Except for less junk mail, I guess.
Can you tell that I think they are a bunch of worthless pantloads? Just checking.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
a perfume gone bad. ig farben was really full of great folks who only cared about humanity, and protested vehemently when the nazis took over.
Obviously the government shouldn't have a police force, since that takes businress away from private security companies. Nor should the government run schools, since that takes money away rom private education. And having an army is unfair competition for mercenaries.
Where can I get a torrent?
If molecules are open source, then people will be able to make them in their own homes, without appropriate supervision or regulation. Many people may not be aware of the following facts about molecules.
-All known chemical poisons are made of molecules.
-Osama bin Laden's men were carrying molecules when they boarded the aircraft destined to strike the WTC towers. It is believed these molecules were used in the attack.
-Molecules are frequently used as part of copyright infringement schemes. Bootleg DVDs contain high concentrations of molecules.
-Weapons of mass destruction contain molecules.
Please, will someone think of the of children?
~Idarubicin
When a market segment shrinks to a sole provider, you are in for trouble.
Its unhealthy when private industry fails the nation - like the production of vaccines needed fast.
But lets be honest here, its just a website, and the cost to keep these running are small - or it could be placed on bittorrent for nix. The call for shutdown is just nasty, although lots of foreign countries would love to see America's chemical industry, and young talent,whither.
yay slashdot socialism!
If they'd been a bit more creative, the ACS would have realized that they have the inside track for developing PubChem. Instead of trying to get Congress to protect their monopoly, created in part with federal funds, they should be seeking federal grant funds to take their database public to make it part of PubChem.
Back in April, the ACS slammed the door shut for data mining with the CAS databases with a new set of license terms. These new conditions prohibit the use of CAS data with data mining tools.
Reply from CAS at http://info.cas.org/acsnih/chronhighedresponse.htm l
There's a HUGE practical problem with the idea of completely privatized health care as espoused by Libertarian ideology. Long before Microsoft demonstrated the "network effect" with regard to software sales, public health researchers knew about it in regards to contagion: the more people around you that have access to health care, the less likely you are to get sick.
Public health (in this country, as in most other industrialized nations) was originally conceived of as the most efficient and effective method of maintaining a healthy workforce with the least total cost to the owning and managing classes.
(extra credit: what roles would be played by libertarians and/or free-market ideologues in this illustrative classic tale?)
Need a UNIX/Linux/network guru in the Boulde
What stupid cock-sucking piss-drinking fuckhead modded this as "flamebait"? Anyone who modded this as "flamebait" is a slut's cunt and wide-open asshole to the government's ever-hard, rampaging cock: i.e., he wants to get fucked repeatedly by Uncle Sam. Stupid shit moron cunt.
By this reckoning, Government should shut down police forces because we have private security firms we can all hire. ...or they should be prohibited from offering free municipal wireless services because there are existing ISPs that can charge to do it.
When did government begin existing at the behest of profiteers?
Government, AKA "the people", has a duty to compete with businesses which inadequately provide an important service. Especially when the people are subsidizing the service - because it's important to the people. The government competition not only can offer a better service, but will force the private competition to exceed the government's, to survive and profit.
There should clearly be constraints on government competition in markets. Entry must require government intervention, under an industrial policy with measurable goals, and published exit criteria. Government should be constrained from competing solely on price, abusing its bottomless pockets, unless there is a pricing crisis in the market. It probably should be required to charge only the median price, forcing that median price down for the same services. And it must deliver only the minimum required service. The entire point is for the people's minimum needs to be met, forcing private competition to increase the quality, or lower the cost, to an acceptable level, in an acceptable timeframe. If the private competitors can't do it, the people might have proven that the need can be served only by a "natural monopoly" (like sewers), and must rely on the government, controlled by the people, to serve as such.
Think of it as "Intelligent Design Evolution" in economic action.
--
make install -not war
However, that is no argument for locking up publicly funded data. Either the public should not be paying for it, or the data should remain public. This is no different than the current bill to lock up taxpayer funded weather data, so that Accuweather doesn't have to compete with free.
I've argued for some time now that it would be much better to simply have companies on the public teat bill citizens directly. You know, $2.67 for the tobacco farmer in KT, $21 for the odd oil company, $.46 for the idiots who build houses on flood plains, etc. Cut out the middleman, and make it apparent who is being payed here. Never fly, of course.
I forget what 8 was for.
When are we going to come up with a term to replace "Source"? Open source only works if there is "Source" involved. As in "Source Code".
How about just saying "Open" leave "Source" off.
As far as I'm concerned, when it's government funded research, the whole population of the country paid for it. They should have access to what was already paid for... their own money should not be used for the sole profit of one publisher. That is wrong, wrong, wrong wrong wrong. We should actually probably start a whole lot of distributed databases. I don't know anything about such things, but I'm pretty sure gomething has to exist where a database might be distributed. I guess Freenet works in a similar way where the "database" is the website. I'm going to let more knowledgeable people comment on that, as I'm really not up to speed. I guess I was really annoyed at how some private interests think they should be the only ones making money out of the pockets of those who already paid for the research (and are likely to have governments cave in, after a bit of lubrication of the right people in the right places). I call them thieves. No other term will do.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Wow. I just used pubchem last week, and I use it often, for doing work at my school. How can they take away something like this? All that would do is limit my learning, and my classmates learning. And we wouldn't pay for this stuff, it's expected to be free. Anyway, I can generate most of this stuff for free with all the chemistry gunk I have on my school linux cluster. How is their arguement valid?! This is like taking away an open source operating system like linux, because it has the possibility of interfering with Microsoft's business? Absolutely wacko.
NCBI, the suborganization of NIH that hosts pubChem, has the goal of offering comprehensive biomedical research databases. Primarily this is protein/DNA sequences as well as structures and links to literature. But proteins interact with small molecules ('chemicals'), and every living organism contains hundreds of thousands of these different molecules (see metabolomics). PubChem provides information about these molecules in the context of biomedical research. So we see PubChem is essential for NCBI's objective.
ACS have an open letter on their site http://www.acs.org/ for anyone interested in getting the whole story.
Bottom line, ACS is trying to protect their investment and jobs regarding CAS.
If your not a chemist or familiar with this data base; at issue is NIH (which is a government granting agency) creating a tool that would compete (for free) with fee for service tool that creates jobs for 1300 people (ACS statistics.)
Can't blame people for being worried about that; they see it as unfair competition.
I'm an ACS member, and I can see both sides of this. If my job were on the line, I would not be happy. However, small startups will benefit with lower R&D costs.
One more thing for all of the "screw the corporation" posters; Pubchem will provide free database access to the entire viewing world thanks to your US tax dollars, costing up to 1300 US jobs in the process (probably.)
Just so you know.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I saw an article 2 years ago about how the competition between the BBC and private broadcasters in the UK has improved the quality of TV show and documentaries etc. because of the increased competition. People complain about the quality level of TV shows (here in north america), and how mosst people know that the most popular shows tend to be the most low-brow and most-common-denominator appeal.
In north america, we have a situation where private industries (entertainment etc.) have created a climat where the population believes the line that "only private industry should compete and has a natural right to compete etc.", and so what do we get? We get diminished selection of availibility of over-priced products. This can be seen in the scientific feild where publishers charge exessive prices for Journals and how this has now produced a naatural fedd-back effect where people are tired of giving thier rights to their own work to these Journals just to be able to publish, and are now publishing through these public portals (which is a big improvement as far as I am concerned, have you every tried to get an article on some feild, only to find out that getting it takes weeks and costs a lot of noney, or else that your local university has stopped caarrying that journal because it costs $29K/year to subscrive too....that's just crazy!). This is why people tend to start revolutions against the poweres that be, it happend when the first microprocessors came out, now you could won your own PC and did not have to cow-tow to the big companies and universities just to get acess to a computer. Those where the days when you had to take 2-4 years of courses at a university just to be able to get acess to a computer and be able to write a program (in those days, it was teletype/puch card and command line crts only!!
So every now and then, people have to stir up the pot, so to speak, and demand their rights back!!
I find it somewhat difficult to believe that you have been a professional chemist for many years without ever having been impacted by the ACS. The ACS publishes virtually every major chemistry journal in the United States and maintains the CAS and SciFinder databases. If you have worked as a chemist "for many years" without ever publishing a journal article in an ACS journal, reading an article in an ACS journal, or looking something up in CAS or SciFinder, I have to wonder what you've been doing. You certainly couldn't have been doing research.
It's the same argument that is being used to attempt to shut down the FAA's free weather services.
His use of that rationale was not the fallacy ad misercordiam; you are mistaken on those grounds.
Wanting to improve the lives of everyone is one of the *best* reasons to make a new law. Provided, of course, that the proposal actually does that (rather than being well-intentioned but ineffective or even harmful to those interests it was meant to advance--see also: patent & copyright law).
Conversely, a law to favor some particular business at the expense of the general public is rightly derided even on those grounds alone. It is better that the few, or even the one, suffer rather than everyone be made instead to suffer.
The approach I take is that some private property is unwarranted and that most taxation is unwarranted. What one produces or procures through labor should be theirs to keep. The opportunities and resources one monopolizes, due to a shady government grant or equally shady notion of original appropriation, require the acceptance of and remuneration to society. Some taxes are theft, other taxes are theft's prevention.
Geolibertarian... the better libertarian.
remember, that there is growing number of people whose mother language is different from English.
maybe even in this my post are some mistakes but: how many languages do YOU know?
petr