Monday, July 2, 2001

House of Representatives Seeks to Close Free Bibliographic Database By ANDREA L. FOSTER Washington A Web site operated by the U.S. Energy Department that allows scientists to search journals for citations and abstracts in the physical sciences is in jeopardy because of a bill approved on Wednesday by the House of Representatives. The bill is accompanied by a report that recommends eliminating the service. The service, PubScience, allows researchers to examine more than a thousand peer-reviewed journals free and at the same time, instead of searching multiple Web sites, publications, and references. PubScience is the Energy Department's most popular Web portal, receiving millions of search requests a year, said Walter Warnick, director of the department's Office of Scientific and Technical Information. The department spends about a half-million dollars a year to operate it. However, a report accompanying the Energy Department's 2002 appropriations bill, H.R. 2311, asks the department "to carefully review its information services such as PubScience to be sure that such efforts remain focused on appropriate scientific journals." A House aide said that the service also competes with private companies that index scientific journals. "The committee is concerned that the department is duplicating technical information services that are already available from the private sector," says the report, which was written by the House Appropriations Committee. The Energy Department is not legally required to abide by the report. But the cautionary language combined with steep budget cuts for the department's technical-management program make eliminating the service a foregone conclusion if the bill is signed into law, an Energy Department official said. The Senate is expected to approve a comparable spending bill for the Department of Energy, but it is unclear whether its legislation will include similar language on PubScience. The PubScience text was inserted in the House report after lobbying by the Software & Information Industry Association on behalf of member companies, including Chemical Abstracts Services, Reed Elsevier, and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, according to the association. "The Department of Energy has entered into the role of secondary publishers," said David LeDuc, a lobbyist for the software association. "There's existing private-sector services. We would like to have the public sector stop competing with these services." But Stephen Miles Sacks, editor and publisher of Scipolicy -- The Journal of Science and Health Policy, said PubScience is the only Web service that compiles abstracts from about 19 small, niche scientific publications, including his. Even if companies start providing such a service, their fees are likely to be too expensive for researchers to afford, he said. He called the House action "irresponsible and damaging to the advancement of science and medicine." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Education Dept. officials promise to clarify rules on student-recruitment incentives Campus executives back away from Knight commission report on college athletics Alabama Supreme Court rules that public schools and colleges must share budget cuts Stripper wins right to rejoin university's track team Glitches turn new online medical-school application into a nightmare House of Representatives seeks to close free bibliographic database The cat-and-mouse game of plagiarism detection Group releases free software for creating a virtual supercomputer  The queen of geek African professors learn online how to teach online