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CAS and Open Access

Open Access is a term with several definitions relating to an important and complex subject.  Originally, we believe, the term denoted the movement dedicated to making journal articles and research free on the web.  This movement seems to have had its genesis in the biological sciences and the perception that much of life science research is government funded and, therefore, ought to be free to researchers.  Also, it appears to have been a reaction to the increasing costs of serials subscriptions over decades.

There appears to be a related school of thought that molecular substance collections should also be free to users.  This represents not an extension of the original concept of Open Access, but rather a separate perception that free-to-user scientific resources on the web are good for science and enable discovery.

CAS has gone on public record regarding this aspect of the "Open Access" movement, as noted in CAS President Robert Massie's Miles Conrad Lecture at the 2008 NFAIS conference.  In this talk, Mr. Massie took the opportunity to explore what Open Access means in the chemical information space and suggested that the discussion need not become "binary".  CAS believes that there are roles for both public and proprietary collections of chemical information.  One of the themes stressed in Mr. Massie's presentation was the rapid, indeed accelerating growth of chemical information and the need for a dedicated effort to collect and systematize that information under stringent quality controls.  The objective is to collect and preserve that wealth of information for the greater good of the scientific enterprise.  That is CAS' mission.  For example, while patents are freely available on the web, deep expert analysis and processing are required to drive the chemical information out of patents and make that information searchable and compatible with other collections.  This is part of the essential work of CAS scientists and systems.

And we have been busy doing that work.  At the time of the NFAIS speech, there were 33 million substances in the CAS REGISTRY^SM.  In the ensuing 15 months, CAS has added more than 14 million new chemical substances to the CAS REGISTRY, for a total of 47 million substances.  The CAS REGISTRY will reach 50 million by the end of this summer.  More than half of those new substance registrations will have been disclosed in patents, indicating that there has been a marked movement toward embedding new molecular discoveries in patents.  For the foreseeable future, we see no possibility that we would be able to discontinue our work in the anticipation that communities will self-organize or standards and collective action will ensure that this important chemical information is collected and stored in a systematic way.  And so we believe that CAS' work and services will continue to be vital to the chemical enterprise, while "free-to-user" collections will also add value and play their role.