July 29, 2005

Databases in Chemistry

To the Editor:

Your June 24 article on the American Chemical Society's dispute with the National Institutes of Health over federal funds used to duplicate the Chemical Abstracts Service's Registry contained a number of factual errors that should be corrected (Hot Type, The Chronicle). ...

Congress has never, to the knowledge of the CAS, considered whether to cut money appropriated for the NIH's PubChem. Nor has the ACS or the CAS, a division of the ACS, asked that this be done.