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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."
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.
Don't forget the military , plenty of Mercenaries out there to do that job. .
Police , forget about it . countless security companies and organised crime rackets to do protection.
Review of laws and making new laws , well there are plenty of private companies who can review legal papers.
Budget , who needs the cabinet , Plenty of accountancy firms
Who needs public libraries when there are book shops.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
In other words, you belive that if the government provides a service it will do so cheaper and better than the private sector, and push them out of the market. I simply don't belive that. The only way that can happen is if public companies manage to change the law in their favour. Otherwise, free competition will in the long run favour the private sector.
All these companies that are complaining about the government taking away their profit by competing with them are doing is whine about the fact that they're losing grip of their monopoly and have to start competing. If the private sector is so bad at providing a service that even public companies are able to compete with them, they truly need the competition.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
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.
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?
Yes, sure, but isn't it essential for a business to come up with something that justifies the cost of their services? In healthcare business private clinics you get to see a specialist sooner. In public transportation it means being able to get a taxi instead of having to wait for a bus/underground.
It's outrageout to say "we produce the same data, so the government should get out of our business". ACS should come up with other services (data mining, consultation,...) by which it differentiates itself from the free service.
The owls are not what they seem
Government shouldn't pay for something that the private sector is already doing. Full stop.
"Full stop"? Oh brother.
As a tax-payer, I'm rather more concerned that my tax-dollars be spent well and for good-purpose.
Often private companies can indeed do a better job, and it's good if the government gets out of the way in such cases (easier said than done of course).
However, sometimes it just doesn't work out that way. Some tasks are accompanied by burdens of transparency, accountability, fairness, etc., and efficiency isn't the most important factor; in such cases the a government agency may just work better in practice, despite inefficiency.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
"Providing universal healthcare will help avoid creating a divide in society between the haves and have nots, such as the divide that many believe is slowly destroying the USA"?
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.
The arguiment boils down to 'Taxation is theft, since it restricts the right to own property'.
This is a extremist stance that has been discussed many times.
If taxation is theft, you should refuse to pay taxes, but if you do, the repo men will come and invade your property, at which time you will be forced to defend yourself and your propery, which will lead to police actions that most probably result in your death. If you however survive, you will be sent to prison where you in all probability will be raped. Hence, taxation is also either murder or rape. But we already knew the latter.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
"The government's job is (...) Military, Police, and Courts."
There is no such thing as an intrinsic State mission. Anarcho-capitalist theorists such as Murray Rothbard suggest to privatize military, police and courts.
In a nation, the authority's job is whatever the people decide it is. This can be as little or as much as they want. It is a mere matter of taste.
he gets paid more than the president?
Most of the executives of mid-to-large sized companies make more than the president. And that includes "non-profit" companies, which just mean they don't generate any net revenue, not that their employees don't make a ton of money out of some mythical sense of benevolence (although, non-profits do have an amazing ability to con such benevolent people into volunteering at the lowest levels, doing the gruntwork for free so the CEO can take home 2.5 million instead of a mere 1.7 million).
On the other hand, harboring a database like this, seems to me outside of the public interest.
No, the database itself most definitely does serve the public interest... Trying to secure exclusive access to that data, however, does not.
Personally, I had the apparently-erroneous belief that you couldn't copyright/patent/trademark/whatever mere facts, only the application of those facts, or the layout of specific collections of those facts. So, while the ACS could stop someone from downloading their entire database and reselling access to it, they don't have much say in someone else offering their own version of the same basic information.
Then again, I also would have thought you couldn't patent trivial boolean operators such as XOR. Silly me.
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
Access to high level chemical and biological research material is hardly a basic service like education.
But, as long as you bring it up, government funded and regulated education is a horrible scam. It's wasteful, it's ineffective, in many cases it repropagates complete falsehoods (eg. Pearl Harbor, the reason why the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the motives and causes behind the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression, and the creation of the Federal Reserve), and in today's world it does little more than preserve the social strata of those who can afford the extra money to live in posh districts.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
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.