Open Access to Drugs (Data)

Here's an interesting confluence of trends:

The Wellcome Trust has awarded £4.7 million [€5.8 million] to EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] to support the transfer of a large collection of information on the properties and activities of drugs and a large set of drug-like small molecules from the publicly listed company Galapagos NV to the public domain. It will be incorporated into the EMBL-EBI's collection of open-access data resources for biomedical research and will be maintained by a newly established team of scientists at the EMBL-EBI.

So here we have commercial drugs data being put into the public domain - no restrictions - and managed by one of the key public databases.

The transfer will empower academia to participate in the first stages of drug discovery for all therapeutic areas, including major diseases of the developing world. In future it could also result in improved prediction of drug side-effects.

Given that the current, capital-intensive method of drug development, which is highly skewed to coming up with drugs for rich, obese Westerners, this openness to all is important: it means that one of the key barriers to discovering new therapies is down, in part, at least.

And as Peter Suber rightly notes:

Kudos to Galapagos and Wellcome Trust not only for opening these data, but for choosing the public domain rather than a license. This fits with Science Commons' latest thinking on barrier-free research and collaboration in the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data.

Public domain redux....

The Digital Sum of Human Knowledge

Most of us think of open access as a great way of reading the latest research online, so there is an implicit assumption that open access is only about the cutting edge. This also flows from the fact that most open access journals are recent launches, and those that aren't usually only provide content for volumes released after a certain (recent) date, for practical reasons of digital file availability, if nothing else.

This makes the joint Wellcome Trust and National Libary of Medicine project to place 200 years of biomedical journals online by scanning them a major expansion not just to the open access programme, but to the whole concept of open access.

It also hints at what the end-goal of open access must be: the online availability of every journal, magazine, newspaper, pamphlet, book, manuscript, tablet, inscription, statue, seal and ostracon that has survived the ravages of history - the digital sum of all written human knowledge.

The European Digital Library: Glimmers of Hope

When I last wrote about the proposed European Digital Library, I was not optimistic about what users might be able to do with its content: "IP" considerations seemed to be raising their ugly head.

But maybe there's hope. A recent background paper contains the following two clueful passages:

The Creative Commons initiative, which started in the USA, is gaining ground in different European countries. It provides a set of user-friendly online licenses giving creators of content the opportunity to protect some of their rights, while giving away others.

and

London’s Wellcome Trust, one of Europe’s largest charities, is planning to launch a system that will archive all papers produced by its grantees in a digital library. Wellcome will require researchers to deposit a copy of the accepted manuscript within 6 months of publication.

Wellcome Moves

The news that the Wellcome Trust has reached an agreement with three publishers of scientific journals to allow Wellcome-funded research published in their journals to be immediately available online and without charge to the reader is good news indeed.

Good because it will make large quantities of high-quality research immediately available, rather than after the tiresome six-month wait that some journals impose when providing a kind of pseudo-open access. Good, because it shows that the Wellcome Trust is willing to put its money where its mouth is, and to pay to get open access. Good, because by making this agreement with Blackwell, OUP and Springer, the Wellcome Trust puts pressure on the the top science publisher, Elsevier, to follow suit.

In fact, thinking about it, I was probably unkind to describe Nature as the Microsoft of the science world: that honour clearly belongs to Elsevier, both in terms of its power and resistance to opening up. Moreover, Nature, to its credit, now gets it about Wikipedia - it even made subscriber-only content freely available. And the conceptual distance between wikis and open access is surprisingly small; so maybe we're seeing the start of a historic shift at Nature.