NIH betrays PTO and patents in proposed deal with ACS

!20050916 NIH betrays PTO and patents in proposed deal with ACS

There is an ongoing squabble between the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) and American Chemical Society (ACS), part of which I reported in an
earlier PATNEWS. The NIH is building something called PubChem, a database
of small molecules with potential use as biological probes or as drug,
including data from a new screening inititative. Of course, when building
such a public database (with submissions from the public), it will be hard
to prevent the addition of other types of molecules. The NIH wants to
integrate PubChem with PubMed, its big database of enhanced abstracts of
the medical literature. All of this is right and proper for a government
agency to be doing (unless you are santorumly bribing Rick Santorum).

The ACS is upset. PubChem has the potential to compete with the ACS'
Chemical Abstract Service, a subscription only database that provides the
ACS with the bulk of their income. ACS is raising the anti-socialist
banner that government agencies shouldn't be doing ANYTHING that the
private sector can do.


In their current negotiations, reported in the 2 September 2005 issue
of Science (page 1473), the NIH is proposing a compromise. One of the
proposals betrays the PTO and the public. From the article:

        NIH would agree not to include nonbiomedical information
        that CAS now offers, such as chemical reactions and
        patents.

If this is right, the public funded NIH that is building a public funded
chemical database is agreeing not to include publicly funded information
from publicly available patents. This is wrong, and people (led by the
PTO) should contact the NIH to lobby that they include as much information
as possible from patents into PubChem. Over time, PubMed + Pubchem becomes
an ever more useful tool for PTO examiners search through to issue highly
quality patents. And higher quality patents is a service the government
should be providing.

Greg Aharonian
Internet Patent News Service


Received on Sat Sep 17 2005 - 07:30:27