Chemical publication open access

Recent advances in chemoinformatics have greatly enhanced the utility of these resources and many are now accessible via the Internet.28 CHEMnet-BASE (www.chemnetbase.com) provides online access to a variety of databases including the Dictionary of Natural Products and the Dictionary of Marine Natural Products, although full access through CHEMnetBASE requires a subscription. The Chemical Structure Lookup Service (http //cactus.nci.-nih.gov/lookup) is an open access database and incorporates information from more than 80 databases on over 27 million structures. PubChem (http //pub-chem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) is another open access database that also links bioassay data to each structure. Measures such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy Mandate should increase the amount of openly accessible information available on the Internet and facilitate dissemination of information. 

A number of speakers commented on the American Chemical Society s policy on open access. Robert Bovenschulte explained that ACS encourages authors to link their article from their own web sites or their institutions web sites to the article on the ACS server. He said that access to the article is free for anyone who reaches the article via this way. However, the number of free accesses per article via this path is limited to 50 during the first year, which is a total reached by hardly any articles according to Bovenschulte. One year after publication, the limit is removed. 

Some participants questioned the six-month wait and the safety of OA to chemical literature. Peter Gregory said that being six months out of date with research, a scientist might as well not bother doing it. He questioned whether open access to chemical literature for the general public is desirable because it would result in information about explosives, propellants, pyrotechnics, bioweapons, and pharmaceuticals becoming freely available. 

Chemicals of concern are typically included in lists maintained by authoritative bodies internationally. An excellent open access source of the lists is contained in the PLuM (Public Library of Materials) database maintained by the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry (http //bcgc. berkeley.edu). The lists included in PLuM along with the number of compounds represented on each list (last updated October 2011) are as follows ... 

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) database is a collection of more than half a million structures, assembled by NCI s Developmental Therapeutics Program (DTP) or its predecessors in the course of NCTs anti-cancer screening efforts that started in the late 1950s (plus the more recent anti-HIV screening) [37-39]. Approximately half of this database is publicly available without any usage restrictions, and is therefore called the "Open NCI Database. For each of these structures (more than 250 000) the DTP record contains at least the chemical structure as a coimection table and an NCI accession number, the NSC number. 

The data bases mentioned so far are readily available to the public. The Federal government alone has over 220 chemical data files in various agencies and in different forms, from file cards to computer files. Many of these are not open to the public, and those that are usually require a formal request for a data-base search. Often, access is limited to those employed in government or as contract researchers for the agency. 

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