Friends: There is a tussle going on in the United States between the bosses of the Chemical Abstracts Service (a part of the American Chemical Society) and Pubchem, a new service supported by NIH. Now a number of health-related academic libraries have come out openly in support of Pubchem. Chemists and life scientists and librarians around the world should come out openly in support of Pubchem and also write to the members of the American Chemical Society requesting the office bearers of ACS and CAS not to sabotage Pubchem, which provides valuable technical information at no cost. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] AAHSL supports PubChem The Association of Academic and Health Science Libraries has publicly released its June 7 letter in support of PubChem. Excerpt: 'I am writing on behalf of the Association of Academic and Health Science Libraries (AAHSL). AAHSL represents 128 libraries located at the nation's academic health centers responsible for training physicians andother health care professionals, providing clinical care, and conducting NIH-funded and other research. We want to express our enthusiastic support fo continuation of PubChem, a chemical database of immense importance to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubChem represents a vital next step for NIH in leveraging its investment in the Human Genome Project, integrating output from the Molecular Libraries Screening Center Netwowrk (MLSCN) and other publicly available data sources, such as NIH's protein structure resources and records of biomedical literature within PubMed and available full-text in the PubMed Central digital archive. PubChem is a powerful tool...that will...lead to medical breakthroughs for clinical treatment of diseases....We believe that [the ACS] concern is unfounded and that the American public is well served by continued development and maintenance of PubChem. By ensuring that publicly financed knowledge is broadly accessible, NIH is enhancing the return on public investment in research and stimulating further innovation by public and private scientific enterprises....It is a mistake to endanger the promise of the [NIH] Roadmap by imposing restrictions on Pubchem that fundamentally undermine its utility. There is simply too much at stake.' Friends: There is a tussle going on in the United States between the bosses of the Chemical Abstracts Service (a part of the American Chemical Society) and Pubchem, a new service supported by NIH. Now a number of health-related academic libraries have come out openly in support of Pubchem. Chemists and life scientists and librarians around the world should come out openly in support of Pubchem and also write to the members of the American Chemical Society requesting the office bearers of ACS and CAS not to sabotage Pubchem, which provides valuable technical information at no cost. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] AAHSL supports PubChem [A] The http://www.aahsl.org/ Association of Academic and Health Science Libraries has publicly released its June 7 http://www.aahsl.org/document/AAHSL_PubChemLetter_June_2005.pdf letter in support of PubChem . Excerpt: 'I am writing on behalf of the Association of Academic and Health Science Libraries (AAHSL). AAHSL represents 128 libraries located at the nation's academic health centers responsible for training physicians andother health care professionals, providing clinical care, and conducting NIH-funded and other research. We want to express our enthusiastic support fo continuation of PubChem, a chemical database of immense importance to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubChem represents a vital next step for NIH in leveraging its investment in the Human Genome Project, integrating output from the Molecular Libraries Screening Center Netwowrk (MLSCN) and other publicly available data sources, such as NIH's protein structure resources and records of biomedical literature within PubMed and available full-text in the PubMed Central digital archive. PubChem is a powerful tool...that will...lead to medical breakthroughs for clinical treatment of diseases....We believe that [the ACS] concern is unfounded and that the American public is well served by continued development and maintenance of PubChem. By ensuring that publicly financed knowledge is broadly accessible, NIH is enhancing the return on public investment in research and stimulating further innovation by public and private scientific enterprises....It is a mistake to endanger the promise of the [NIH] Roadmap by imposing restrictions on Pubchem that fundamentally undermine its utility. There is simply too much at stake.'